That Which You Seek
by Wynn
Summary: A few days after Bucky discovers his true identity, Darcy encounters him in a diner 50 miles outside of D.C. having apparently transformed from a handsome long-dead war hero into a creepy, scruffy, pancake-hating serial killer. So of course she tries to help him. Set post-Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
1. Chapter 1

That Which You Seek

Part One

By: Wynn

The man in the booth before Darcy stares down at his pancakes with suspicion. He fingers his fork with his right hand, his left held stiffly between his legs beneath the table. Beyond the brim of his baseball cap, she sees his eyes dart from his fork to his spoon to the cup of water beside him. He clenches his jaw and draws in a stilted breath, but the breath does nothing to ease the tension within him. He releases the fork only to grasp it again; his eyes resume their revolution around the table: napkin to plate to glass to fork and then, suddenly, to her. Darcy is too shocked at the sudden eye contact to look away or even to feel the shame for gawking at this guy as he tries to eat breakfast for dinner, the holiest of all meals. Instead, she gapes right back.

He gives her the same look as he gave the pancakes. She understands his need to glare. He must get a lot of stares, his hair long and tangled beneath his hat, an unkempt beard darkening his face. The unfortunate state of his follicles is not enough though to mar the bright blue of his eyes or the straight line of his jaw. Beneath the hobo lies a hottie; either would be enough to draw people's attention. Darcy is just about to send him an apologetic grin when his right hand shifts, from his fork to his knife. Something in the shift, in the way that his fingers hover over the blade, raises the hair on the back of her neck. She tenses and he does too. His eyes bore into her, and she feels her breath catch in her chest. She has her taser in her bag and her knife before her, but the man has at least fifty pounds on her, likely all muscle given the hang of his jacket on his shoulders. Seconds slip by. They continue to stare, and she is just about to scramble from the booth for the door and her rental car outside when the man shudders and closes his eyes. He drops his head and shoves his right hand beneath the table beside his left, and he sits like that, shaking, trying his best to breathe.

Darcy glances at the other patrons in the diner, an old man over at the counter, a mom and two kids behind her, a group of construction workers two tables over. She eyes the waitress behind the counter and then the cashier flipping through a magazine by the register. None of them seem to have seen what just occurred. Would it matter if they had? The construction workers could have done something. Maybe. Or maybe the man would just kill them too after he'd killed her. Her heart pounding in her chest, Darcy turns again to the man. He still hasn't moved. She eyes her plate. Half her French toast still awaits her consumption; she hasn't even touched her scrambled eggs. But she doesn't intend to now. Sliding her napkin from her lap, Darcy grabs the strap of her bag and begins to ease from the booth. She takes another peek at the man to check that he remains in place. He stares out the window now, his jaw again clenched. Darcy sees the sheen of tears in his eyes, and there's something about him, about the set of his shoulders and the look in his eyes, that makes her stop.

She sits, half in and half out of the booth, her hands clenched around the strap of her bag. She should go. She knows she should go. The switch could turn back to homicidal any second, especially as Darcy is even less subtle with her rubbernecking now. But she can't, a shade of a memory fixing her in place. She stares at the man, studying his jacket, his hat, both a non-descript black. Did she know him in high school? The thought of one of her fellow deviants in academia being a serial killer didn't surprise her. The line of his jaw captures her attention again, and the shadow shifts, slightly. Then he does too, the man turning to her once more, and when he does, the shadow lifts entirely and she finds herself staring at the face of a dead man that had stared at her from every history textbook she'd ever studied in her academic career.

Bucky Barnes.

"Holy shit."

His eyes narrow, but he makes no move for his knife this time. Licking her lips, Darcy tries to process this reality before her. It's surprisingly easy. She blames Thor for that. When your reality expands to include god-kings from alien worlds and evil world-ending smoke, the miraculous and seemingly murderous resurrection of a genuine war hero, the best pal of Captain America at that, does not seem so farfetched. Darcy dredges up distant memories of her history books, of her many trips to the Smithsonian when she was in school, of when she was thirteen and she and her friends had each chosen their own Commando to moon over and dream about. Darcy had, as improbable as it seems now, chosen him. Most of her other friends had fought over the Captain, but she had immediately liked the rakish smirk that had greeted her in Bucky's pictures. The man before her now is him. She knows that it is. She feels it in her gut. His hair is longer and the scruff is there and most of the pictures that she'd obsessed over had been in black and white, obscuring the blue of his eyes, but it's him, Bucky Barnes, nearly seventy years after his death, apparently a creepy, pancake-hating serial killer.

"Holy shit," she says again.

He is quiet a moment and then he says, his voice too soft for the hard set of his jaw, "You know me."

Darcy hesitates. She probably shouldn't engage creepy, pancake-hating war hero/serial killers in conversation, but when the hell has she ever done the smart thing? Never, according to her father, and rarely, according to Jane. She couldn't let either of them down now, so, still half in and out of the booth, she nods.

"As who?"

The question makes her frown. She eyes Bucky, trying to determine if he's joking or even more insane that she originally thought. She decides neither. Sincerity stares back at her, with a healthy dose of confusion heaped on top. Confusion and desperation. Breathing in, she relaxes her grip on her bag a fraction of an inch and says, "Bucky Barnes."

He looks away at the name. Darcy watches as he shifts, as his gaze darts once more from fork to knife to plate to cup. He stares at them as though they are unfamiliar; he sits as though his body is too. A memory worms its way into her brain, of Selvig in the institution. The way he'd looked at her when he first saw her, unable to remember who she was, too high on meds and too broken from Loki, reminds her of this man. Of Bucky. He blinks and swallows, but neither action does anything to dull the gleam of tears in his eyes, and the sight plucks at something inside her, the same place reserved for Selvig and for Jane before Thor returned, the place for her mother and for lost dogs on the sides of the roads.

She eases back into the booth. "You don't remember."

His eyes snap up to her face.

She arches a brow. "Do you?"

He stares at her, his gaze as intent as before, but she sees no murderous intentions in his eyes now. Just the same confusion and desperation that pulls at her. His chest shudders as he breathes in again. She waits, patient in a way few thought she could be when she was young. But she's had practice, the end of the world working to pull her out of herself and into something more.

After another moment, Bucky shakes his head, the movement stiff.

Darcy gives a slow nod, more for her benefit than his. She reaches for her dripping glass of water, swallowing a mouthful in an effort to figure out what to do. She'd been on her way to D.C. to interview with Coulson, finally succumbing to the numerous emails he'd sent to her after the shenanigans in London. She'd resisted his wooing, still envisioning him as the nefarious iPod thief, but Thor had given Coulson his stamp of approval. S.H.I.E.L.D. had returned Jane's stuff after all and had helped keep her safe when the world almost ended in New York. And Thor had said they'd helped there too, trying to stop Loki and his rage-fueled invasion. The thought of helping in a capacity larger than unpaid intern had appealed to Darcy so she came, but then S.H.I.E.L.D. had arrested Captain America and ships had fallen from the sky and Darcy had stopped fifty miles from the city, calling Jane, who had asked Thor, who had spoken to Tony, who only knew that Coulson was clean, the Captain was alive, S.H.I.E.L.D. was dead, and shit had just gotten real.

Darcy looks at Bucky. Yes. Yes, it definitely had.

She wonders if he had been involved in the action in D.C. Or if he was going there now, drawn by the Captain's obvious presence. Being here, so close to D.C. so soon after everything that happened, with no memory of himself and an inclination for murder, was too strange to just be a coincidence. She breathes in again and takes another drink of water. She should call Coulson. Or Jane again. Jane could get Thor to get Tony who had the best shot of reaching the Captain. He was the most qualified to deal with this, with Bucky, being all super-powered and able to handle attacks from dull knives. Yet as she watches Bucky inch his right hand out from under the table to grasp his fork with shaking fingers, she finds herself reaching not for her phone but for her plate to move from her booth to his.

"Can I sit?" she asks, sending him a soft smile.

Which goes unnoticed as Bucky stares down at his food. She feels the tension emanate from him, the man a high wire, a clock string wound too tight. "You shouldn't."

"Probably not. Especially since you wanted to stab me a few minutes ago. Don't think I didn't notice that, by the way." Bucky peers at her from the corners of his eyes, but she plows on, not waiting for him to confirm or deny. "However, you need help. That much is obvious. And that's kind of what I do now."

Her heart clenches at the worried tilt of his brows. Shifting her plate from her right hand to her left, Darcy grabs her bag and jiggles it at him. "I've also got a taser in my bag and I know how to use it, so in the event that you do try to stab me, I'll tase you until you fall face first into your pancakes. Also, I know Thor."

Bucky tilts his head toward her, frowning now. "Thor?"

For a moment, she can't respond, this development too much for her (who doesn't know Thor? everyone knows Thor), but before she can even try to process, Bucky's eyes widen and a knife appears in his hand, one jagged and sharp and much more sinister than the dull diner blade on the table. He lunges toward her and tackles her around the waist. As they fall to the ground, Darcy thinks that she's going to die and how stupid she'd been to try to help, she's not in S.H.I.E.L.D., she's not an Avenger, she's just a dumb intern, but then she hears the sound of gunfire ripping through the diner and she realizes that she still might die, but not from Bucky.

From whoever's trying to kill him.

Bucky pushes Darcy to the ground and springs up off her before she can even catch the breath she lost. Her plate shatters on the floor beside her, splashing her with egg and French toast. Twisting around, she sees the four construction workers converge on Bucky. She can barely follow their fight, the five a blur of movement. One of the workers fires a gun at Bucky. Darcy flinches, her heart in her throat, but Bucky raises his left arm and the man with the gun falls to the ground dead. A second goon moves in before Darcy can figure out what happened to the first, how Bucky still has an arm, much less a heartbeat. She hears the crackle of electricity, sees a prod of sorts in the new goon's hand. Bucky slashes down with his knife and catches the goon across the forearm. A bright arc of blood gushes into the air. Darcy turns away cringing, and it is only because she turns that she sees the waitress lift a gun and shoot the old man at the counter in the head.

"Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god."

Darcy scrambles beneath the table, knocking against a large black duffel bag. Her hands dart into her bag for her phone and her taser. She hears the sound of gunfire, then breaking wood and shattering glass. She hears groans of pain and screams so high she knows they belong to a child. Shaking, she clicks on Contacts and then on Jane. Holding the taser before her, Darcy waits. The phone rings, a chair flies by, there is another yell, from a man this time, and then Jane answers the phone.

"Darcy, I'm sorry, but I can't—"

Gunfire erupts again, this time directed at the booth in which Darcy hides. The bullets smash the plates and glasses, they slam down onto the table, but they don't plow through. Pressing herself between the wall and bag, Darcy tries to focus and stay calm.

Jane gasps at the sounds of the battle. "Darcy, what—"

"I found him."

"What?"

"I found Bucky. Tell—"

She doesn't get the opportunity to finish for the woman with the gun pops into view. Darcy drops the phone and fires her taser. The electric nodes strike the woman in the face. As she recoils, Darcy darts out from under the table. Two of the four men fighting Bucky lie on the ground dead. The other two hold him, one from behind, one arm around Bucky's neck, the other pressing the electric prod into his side. The other man is before him, fighting for the knife in his hands. Darcy runs for the door. She hears something crack, followed by a bellow of pain. She doesn't know if the man in pain is Bucky. She doesn't turn to look. She grabs her keys from her bag instead. The cashier lay crumpled by the register, a phone in his hands and a bullet in his head. She sees the family in the last booth slumped over, blood pooling onto the floor beneath them. And then she's falling, the woman tackling her from behind.

Darcy slams into the ground, her breath leaving her again as the woman falls on top of her. She tries to twist around, to face the woman, to remember what she learned in her self-defense class in college, how she should go for the eyes or throat, but she remembers nothing, she only moves, lashing out with the keys in her hand and gouging the woman in the face. She hisses in pain and wrenches Darcy's wrist down to the floor. She holds the gun in her other hand. Darcy looks at the barrel, she stares death in the face, but then a hand clamps down onto the woman's shoulder and she goes flying back across the diner. Darcy watches as she slams into the far wall. Bucky stands between them, his hat gone, his back to Darcy, a gun in his hand now. She watches as he lifts it, as he aims at the woman who struggles to get to her feet.

Darcy closes her eyes and twists away as he fires.

Seconds pass, yet no further violence erupts. Easing around, Darcy opens her eyes. She finds Bucky by the people—the bodies—stripping the men of their weapons. He moves with precision, with the bearing of a soldier. Standing, he sheds his jacket, revealing a torn and bloodied plaid shirt beneath, but it's not the shirt that draws her attention. It's his left arm, visible through the shredded sleeve, gleaming silver and bright. She'd read about advances in prosthetics, knew that Stark Industries was at the forefront of innovation in that field, but this is like nothing she's ever seen, that hand and arm as functional as his right. Bucky returns to his booth, reaches beneath, and pulls out the black duffel bag. She watches as he unzips it, as he unearths a black leather jacket. He strips off the torn plaid shirt, then the bloodied t-shirt beneath, and she can't help but gape at the scars that crisscross his chest, at those that encircle his left shoulder in jagged thick lines, at the wound leaking blood on his left side.

The blood restores her voice. "Are you—"

"I'm not compromised."

Darcy frowns, but doesn't continue her question. Bucky zips into the jacket, half a jacket really, and more armor than jacket. She's reminded of the jacket he wore as a Commando, the elegance of the lines are the same, both so different from the usual military garb. Bucky removes a harness from the bag, puts it, and then begins to secure the guns from the dead men. He attaches his knife as well, the edges dark with blood. He stores the other weapons in his bag before moving toward the woman, seizing both her gun and Darcy's discarded taser.

A tinny screaming draws her attention and his too. Through the blood on his face, she sees him frown. He crouches again beside his booth and peers into the depths a moment before reaching in for her phone. Darcy eases to her feet as he stares down at her phone, Jane audible across the distance, still screaming for her. Bucky clenches his jaw. He glances at her. She can't read the look in his eyes. She waits for him to crush her phone, to proceed to kill her as he originally intended, but instead he lifts the phone to his ear and says, his voice still too soft for the blood that he wears and the guns that he carries and the death that he deals with ease, "She's alive."

The shouting stops, but Bucky doesn't continue the conversation. He ends the call by turning off the phone and then starts toward Darcy. She pushes her hair from her face with a shaking hand. He stops before her, but she doesn't speak, she doesn't even think to quip, not with the scent of blood clogging the air around her and making her gag. Bucky regards her a moment more then extends his hand, offering Darcy her phone. She hesitates too, though she doubts that this is a trick designed to distract her, to give him the opportunity to kill her without a fight. If he wanted her dead, he would have let the woman with the gun shoot her. But he didn't. Swallowing hard, Darcy claims her phone and then the taser he holds out to her a second later.

"More are outside," he says, looking toward the frosted-glass windows. "Five is not enough. If you stay here, you will die."

Darcy eyes the door. Five is not enough. Of course it isn't. Not with how fast he moves and how strong he is. He isn't as fast or as strong as Thor, but Bucky is more than human, more like the Captain when she watched him spar with Thor during his visit in February.

"I…"

Darcy looks back at Bucky. He stares at the floor, his jaw tight, his brows again at the anxious tilt that clamps down on her throat and tugs at her gut.

Feeling her gaze upon him, he tries again. "I don't…"

She stares at him a few seconds before comprehension clicks. "You don't know."

He gives a small nod.

"Do you want to know?"

Bucky meets her eyes, his look an affirmation, a supplication. Darcy glances again at the door. She could wait, she could call the cops or call Jane again and hunker down until the former come or Thor arrives, or maybe Tony, closer in New York and friendly with Jane and Thor. But she sees movement beyond the frosted glass, and she knows that Bucky is right. If she stays here, she will die.

If she goes with him, she might live.

"Okay," she says, facing him again. "I'll go with you. I'll help you. Or I'll try to. _But _you have to get me out of here alive. _And_," she continues, dropping her gaze to his knife, "you can't try to stab me again."

"I didn't try."

Darcy gives him a look. "You wanted to. Same diff."

At that, Bucky frowns. "You were staring at me."

For the second time that evening, Darcy gapes at him, unable to process. As if that made sense, stabbing the people who stared at you. Or maybe it did, Darcy takes in the bloodshed around them. This seemed to be normal for him, given the ease with which he fought. She ignores that thought, what it means for her and her near future. Instead, she draws upon all of the patience that her mother and now Selvig gave to her and says, "Of course I was staring at you. People stare. That's what they do. You can't kill everyone who stares at you."

Bucky nods. The nod, the solemnity of it, the need for guidance fueling it, so desperate that he seeks it now from her, disquiets Darcy. She looks away, overwhelmed by him and the hints she has of his life after the war. She had no clue how she was going to help him, or even if she could, scientists sans pants about all she could successfully handle. She looks at Bucky as he moves to the door. This—amnesiac, pancake hating robo-killers—were far beyond her skill set.

"Can you shoot?" he asks, tilting his head toward her.

"No."

Bucky kneels down and paws through the bag. He takes out the electric prod and hands it to her. "This is like your taser," he says as he pulls out two large guns, the kind she's only seen in movies. "If anyone gets close to you, press the button, touch them, and they'll go down."

"You didn't."

Bucky stands, armed and bloodied. Clear eyes look at her, no arrogance there to blind him, no fear present to cloud him. Just the clarity, nothing beneath. She shivers at the sight and again when he says, "They're not me."

Looking away, she bypasses that obvious truth for the other. "Why would they get close enough for me to use this? Wouldn't they just shoot me?"

Bucky doesn't respond. Darcy looks back at him, sees a smudge of discomfort streaking the clarity now. He forces himself to meet her gaze. "They'll want you alive," he says. "They'll want…"

"What?"

He swallows and drops his gaze. "Why I talked to you."

Darcy stares at him a moment before shaking her head. "No. You mean why you didn't kill me."

Bucky shrugs but still doesn't look at her. "Same diff."

Her jaw drops, but he pays no attention to her shock. Instead, he moves to the inner door and drops into a crouch. Darcy follows and they ease out into the foyer. There, through the blinds, she sees three Hummers arrayed before the diner and men with guns hiding behind. She glances at Bucky, at the two guns in his hands and the five strapped to his chest. She hopes they are enough.

"Wait here until I tell you to move. When I do, get to your car, start it up. When I join you, drive north."

Darcy nods. She feels her heart stutter in her chest, fear beginning to take hold. "What if…" She stops, unable to voice the thought. But her hesitation draws his attention. Licking her lips, she tries again. "What if you die?"

"I won't," he says as he stands. The clarity is back, Bucky the hurricane and the calm center of the storm. As he reaches for the door, he looks back at her and says, "They didn't bring enough."


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: Thank you so much to everyone who has left a review or favorited/followed the story! The response has been overwhelming in the best way. I hope everyone likes this next part. I tried to make it as action packed as the first. :D**

That Which You Seek

Part Two

By: Wynn

They—the men that encircle the diner—have three Hummers gleaming black and evil in the setting sun. They have eighteen goons of varying heights and weights, from the decently muscled to those that Darcy could call Thor Jr. if any of them were blond and preferred Sweet Tarts to mass slaughter. They have combat boots and body armor, protective goggles and face masks. And they have guns, dozens of them, two or three per goon, small grey ones strapped to their thighs and sides, slender rifles with scopes that she knows are alive like Hal 9000 from _2001_, and guns so large that a quip about compensation forces its way into her brain.

And what does Bucky have?

He has seven guns and one knife, a cattle prod and a spent taser, one rental car (a Prius because the agency offered Darcy a discount for caring about the environment) complete with a half-eaten bag of Doritos inside, and one scared former intern who's in over her head and about two seconds away from peeing her pants. Yet, despite this disparity, Bucky strides from the diner with no hesitation, his guns in hand and his face set, the man an unholy mix of Paul Newman and the Terminator.

If Darcy weren't so terrified about her imminent death, she would stand up and cheer the remarkable confidence. As it is, she cowers by the door, the cattle prod clutched tight in her hands and her bag slung over her shoulder. She expects for the fight to begin immediately, for bullets to fly and blood to spill, but nothing happens as Bucky makes his way into the parking lot. This unsettles her more than anything else that evening. Birds chirp in the trees and a red convertible whizzes by, oblivious to the carnage about to unfurl. Darcy watches as Bucky stops dead center between her and the Hummers. As he does, a man with close-cropped grey hair and a red star sewn onto his armor raises a megaphone. Static crackles and then he speaks, his voice tinged with a faint German accent.

"Soldier, you are ordered to stand down and return for debrief. Director's orders."

Bucky tilts his head to the side and peers at the man, but he makes no move to cease and desist.

The man speaks again, in Russian this time rather than English. Darcy thinks that he says the same thing, this sentence as short as the last. To this command, Bucky clenches his jaw. At the sight, the men by the Hummers tense. They shift positions, lifting their guns higher into the air. Darcy feels sweat slide down her brow as her eyes dart from one group to the next, checking to see if any have noticed her, if any now aim at her, but all eyes and guns remain on Bucky, so she returns her gaze to him too.

The leader activates the megaphone again and says something else, also in Russian.

Bucky eases his weight to his left and narrows his eyes.

The man barks out another order, in German this time, the shout as grating as glass on concrete. Whatever he says makes Bucky stiffen. His lip curls and he says something in return, something Darcy cannot hear, the breeze carrying the words away from her to the darkness beyond, and then, with no other warning, he raises the gun in his right hand and fires.

Something bigger than a bullet flies from the barrel. It strikes the ground beside the man with megaphone and explodes. The man vanishes into a billowing cloud of flames, one that engulfs a second goon and half the Hummer too. The rest of the goons scatter, seeking protection from the heat and from Bucky too, who charges toward the Hummer. He leaps onto the hood and smashes the windshield with his left arm. Shoving the barrel of the gun into the hole, he fires again, flipping up and off as the grenade explodes, consuming the interior of the car and a third goon in a swath of orange and red.

Bucky lands between the burning Hummer and the one closest to her car. He kicks one man back into the fire, turns, and shoots at a second. Bullets fly at him from the repositioned enemy, but none of them find purchase. He moves too quickly, spinning, sliding, and darting away. As he moves, he fires, and the goons drop like flies, a third and a fourth and then a fifth, eight in total since the fight began, their armor useless and their guns pointless against Bucky. One darts forward to engage in hand-to-hand, but Bucky slams the butt of the grenade gun into his face before shoving the barrel of the other rifle up under his vest and firing.

Darcy gasps and turns away at the gush of blood that spurts into the air. At her gasp, the two goons closest to her car turn and sprint toward her. With shaking hands, Darcy stands and lifts the prod. She hopes that Bucky was right, that they charge toward her now to capture, not to kill. She fumbles for the activation switch, wishes she had a third hand to push her hair from her eyes.

Bucky turns at their approach. Darcy sees his mouth flatten into a thin line and then he takes two steps, vaults through the air, and springboards off the roof of the Hummer to land between her and them. But as he does, enemy fire finally hits its mark, bullets slamming into his chest and back. She sees no blood, though, and hears no scream. Bucky just lashes out, kicking the first of the men so hard that he soars up and out of the parking lot, landing with a crunch on the other side of the two-lane highway. Darcy expects the second one to run, for any of them to run, but none of them do. The second one drops his gun and moves in, a knife in his hands. Yet this new weapon proves as useless as the others. Bucky slides his guns toward her rental car and then retrieves his own knife, not to fight, but to throw. The knife finds the hollow of the second man's throat, sliding in as smooth and slick as its proverbial brother through butter. As the man crumples to the ground, Bucky snatches the knife from his dying hands, turns to her, and bellows, "Go!"

She does, sprinting for her car. Darcy fishes her keys out of her pocket, but then the remaining goons by the final Hummer open fire. The bullets slam into the ground before her, halting her progress. She cries out, sliding to a stop, nearly falling as a bullet slams inches from her feet, sending a spray of concrete towards her face. Bucky lunges for his guns by her car, rolls over and up with one clutched in his hands. He fires three rounds in quick succession at the men by the Hummer. Darcy feels the explosions in her chest; the hem of her shirt quivers from the vibrations that cascade through the air. The shooting stops and Darcy resumes her run. She shoves the cattle prod into her bag and clicks the remote lock, reaching the car as Bucky does. He stays outside as she scrambles inside, continuing to shoot into the flames. When her key hits the ignition he slides inside, and they peel out of the parking lot, heading north.

"Are you injured?" he asks as they race down the road.

Darcy shakes her head, then realizes he can't see her, Bucky turned to face the rear, to gaze back at the diner. "No. Are you?"

"Drive as fast as you can."

Darcy frowns at the response. She glances at him, her mouth open to clarify, but in her glance, she sights one of the Hummers, the one closest to her car, the only one not in flames, careen out of the parking lot after them. It smashes into a brown Taurus that attempts to pull into the diner for dinner, rights itself, and zooms forward.

"No. No no no no no."

"Drive straight," Bucky says. He checks the two guns in his hands, sliding out parts and peering into dark caverns. Discarding the grenade gun, he continues, his voice low and steady, "They'll catch us. When they do, keep driving. I'll stop them."

"You'll stop them? You'll _stop_ them?" Darcy winces at the shrill edge of hysteria in her voice, but she can't stop herself from speaking, driven now by panic. "How? How _exactly _will you stop them? You're in a _car_. And not a fancy James Bond car either with missiles in the brake lights. You're in a _Prius_, which is about as deadly as my eighty-five year old _grandmother_, who couldn't even kill a fly if you gave her a goddamn _bazooka_ to shoot it with."

Bucky just stares at her, nonplussed at her distress. Darcy would probably stare at herself too, if she could, her facial expressions likely as deranged as her voice. She tries to breathe in, to ease the death clench she has on the steering wheel, but her efforts are for naught for, a second later, Bucky answers her question by lifting his hand and beginning to lower the passenger window.

"Oh. Of _course_. You're going _outside _to stop them. How stupid of me. We're only going _sixty_ down this godforsaken death road."

Bucky twists around until he completely faces the backseat. "I've done faster."

The claim renders her silent. Of course he has. Of course. He's probably done this in twelve inches of snow before, driving uphill both ways. Shaking her head, Darcy focuses on the road ahead of them, clear for the moment, but with a curve soon and then a few stoplights. She tries not to think about what might happen if the light is red, if she has to stop, if the Hummer catches up with them and there are other people at the light or none at all.

In the rearview, the Hummer closes in. Darcy reaches for her seatbelt, and as if that were the cue, Bucky thrusts himself out of the window. He shoves one boot on the dash and the other on the seat to brace himself and a second later she hears him fire. Glancing back, she sees a sunroof open on the Hummer. One of the goons pops up, a gun in hand, but he only remains in place a moment, Bucky firing again and hitting him. Killing him. The Hummer, though, doesn't stop. It gains as Bucky said it would, and they belt down the road toward the curve ahead.

"I have to slow down!" she yells out the window. "There's a curve."

Bucky shoves a hand back through the window and gives her a complicated gesture, which she interprets as okay. But he doesn't climb back inside. Instead, he slings the rifle down onto the floor, grabs the roof with his left hand, and hauls himself all the way out of the car. Darcy hits the brake, trying to keep the Prius smooth and steady. And the Hummer slows too, but not for the curve, for Bucky, who runs over the roof and onto the trunk before launching himself into the air and landing on his feet on the hood of the SUV.

The last thing Darcy sees before she careens around the curve is Bucky hauling the dead man out of the sunroof and tossing him onto the ground.

As she takes the curve, she skids into the left lane, but it's blessedly empty. She sees cars at the distant light though prepared to advance, and she shivers at the thought of them getting caught in the crossfire. Darcy only focuses on them a moment though, a booming screech of metal behind her drawing her attention. Glancing in the rearview, she sees the Hummer, flipped now onto its side, plow through the curve, off the road, and into the bank of trees lining the highway. Darcy slams on the brakes as it slams into a tree; she hears the snap of a trunk and a second later a slim pine wobbles and falls back onto the Hummer, landing with piercing scrape of wood on metal.

"Jesus Christ."

Fumbling for the gearshift, Darcy yanks the car into reverse and fishtails back toward the wreck. She sees no movement, the Hummer covered by the pine. No gunshots or howls of pain reach her either; she hears only the rush of the wind through the open window. Forty feet from the wreck, she stops the car, but she can't bring herself to get out, the diner flashing into her mind. Instead, she unbuckles her seatbelt to twist around in her seat and wait.

Seconds pass. Darcy licks her lips and tries to breathe, but panic seizes her lungs and they refuse to function. She wipes her hands on her jeans again and replays Bucky's leap from the Prius to the Hummer. If he did that, he could survive this. In the diner, he was stabbed. In the parking lot, he was shot. If he survived those, a pine tree would be nothing. A car crash would be nothing. Large men with even larger guns would be nothing.

He's okay. He's okay.

She didn't just kill Captain America's BFF with her desire to stay alive.

Headlights approach from the cars at the stoplight. In the illumination, she sees the pine tree rustle, then a figure in black emerges from the wreck. Darcy claws for her bag and grasps the cattle prod, waiting, waiting, sweat sliding down her face again, and then she sees the shine of Bucky's arm in the light as he climbs out of the Hummer. Hot tears prick her eyes at the sight. Darcy tries not to cry, but the tears fall regardless of her will. She gives them a moment, laying her forehead against the headrest, she gives _herself_ a moment, this day not at all how she thought it would be. She tries to swallow, but her mouth is dry and her throat is tight, clogged with the sticky residue of easing anxiety. Breathing in, she discards the cattle prod into the passenger seat and then turns around, reaching for the gearshift to shift into reverse.

Darcy reaches Bucky as he emerges from the trees, blood drenching his face from a cut on his forehead, his right arm cradled around his body. Otherwise he seems fine, listing a bit to the side, but no obvious limp or hindrance to his approach. As she steps from the Prius, the first car from the stoplight passes by. Bucky stops as the car slows down. He tracks its approach, his left arm easing behind his body, no doubt for a gun. Darcy glances behind her to see a white mini-van inch past, a tiny face pressed up against the passenger window. Gasping, she whirls back around, but Bucky has not moved. He watches the mini-van, his chest heaving, but the van passes without incident and Darcy releases a long breath.

"Are you all right?" she asks, moving toward him.

His eyes shift to her, but he doesn't respond to her question. He just stares at her as he stared at the van, as he stared at the pancakes before. Shit. _Shit_. Holding up her hands, she says, "It's me. Darcy. From the diner, remember?"

A second car approaches. Bucky turns toward it. As he does, she sees his hand as she thought, wrapped around a gun. Darcy casts a quick glance at this car, making sure it's not another evil gleaming death machine. At the sight of the green hatchback, Darcy eases over until she's once more in Bucky's line of sight. When he meets her eyes a second time, she says to him, "You're Bucky Barnes. You asked me to help you. Remember? In the diner, by the door, you said you didn't know and I—"

His gaze darts from her to the car and back again.

"I said I would," she says, easing toward him. "I said I'd help you if…"

Bucky peers at her. He presses his mouth into a tight line and draws in a shuddering breath.

Darcy hears the squeak of brakes as the car slows. "If what?" she prompts, trying to keep calm, to keep him calm, to keep the bloodshed limited to those in the diner and not to the road beyond.

Bucky stares at her, again the taut wire from the diner, plucked now and vibrating from the strain of battle. Another second passes and then another and then he releases a shuddering breath. She watches as he closes his eyes, as he twists his head away from her, but she doesn't relax until he loosens his hold on the gun behind him and lowers his arm.

"If I didn't try to stab you."

Relief rushes through Darcy at his quiet admission. She nods and eases closer to him, stopping about a foot away. "Right. If you didn't try to stab me. Let's go ahead and add shooting to that list, okay?"

Bucky opens his eyes and gives a small nod. Her breath catches in her chest at the sight. She had expected a small smile or an exasperated look from him, something normal, something human in response to her request, not this, not him broken and compliant, so far from the man who won their escape in fire and blood. Darcy reaches out, but she hesitates at laying her hand on his arm. He doesn't seem to notice either her arm or her hesitation, so she turns the reach into a point toward the Prius. "Let's get out of here."

Bucky nods again and turns toward her rental car. As she turns with him, she sees the hatchback stopped. An older man has stepped out, his face creased in concern as he takes in the broken trees, the overturned Hummer, and Bucky covered in blood.

"Are you guys okay?"

Darcy nods. She eyes the woman in the passenger seat, who gapes at Bucky's metal arm.

"Are you sure? I—"

"We're fine."

The man's eyes widen at her sharp tone.

Darcy summons a smile and tries to release some of the tension still tightening her throat. "Just some cuts and scrapes, thanks. We'll be fine."

The man nods. He makes no move to approach, but he doesn't return to his car either, his gaze instead shifting to the crashed SUV. Darcy searches his face, she tries to detect any hidden evil within him, the waitress in the diner seeming normal at first, but she can't, a sound by the Prius tugging her attention away. She finds Bucky by the backseat door, fumbling with the handle, his right hand slick with blood. Darcy leans over to help him, but he tenses at her approach so she stops. Then the man speaks again.

"Is there anyone else in the car?"

Darcy freezes at the question. Bucky does too. He tilts his head to the side and looks at her. The blue of his eyes shines bright through the blood, the contrast as sharp and unsettling as that which exists between his arms. Darcy struggles to reconcile the two sides, the silent shadow before her now, the man who shook as he tried to eat his pancakes for dinner, and the fierce fighter of the past half-hour, the man who took on twenty-four armed men and killed them all. She finds that she can't, her brain overwhelmed by the events of the evening, by her recollections of the diner and the smell of blood thick in the air.

Whatever Bucky sees in her face makes him look away. He glances at his hand, at the blood on the door. He moves, perhaps to wipe it off on his pants, but he stops before doing so. Drawing in a breath, he turns to the man. A beat passes in which he stares and then he says, his voice quiet in the imminent night, "Not anymore."


	3. Chapter 3

AN: Thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a review or to follow/favorite. The response to the story has been surprising and overwhelming in the best way, and I'm truly grateful at the feedback I've received. Thank you! This chapter is lighter on the action but heavier on the angst and feels. I hope you enjoy.

That Which You Seek

Part Three

By: Wynn

They leave the old man and his gaping wife and drive north. Darcy resists the urge to floor the accelerator, to put as many miles as she can between her and the carnage they flee, also wishing to avoid the attention of the police. _That _would be a nightmare, cops generally wary of bloody, amnesiac gun-toting cyborg-men.

At the thought of Bucky, Darcy peeks at him in the rearview. He slumps against the backseat, his right arm still cradled around his body, his hand in a tight fist above his navel. He stares out the window, but she doubts he sees anything, no focus to his gaze now, not as before when he fought the men. No trace of that prior intensity remains, Bucky used up and hollowed out. The change in him unsettles her. What had happened to him to make him this way, the lion one moment and the lamb the next? The thoughts that come, the possible answers, turn her stomach. No one would flinch the way he had when she tried to help him open the door that hadn't endured abuse of some kind, possibly torture. She knew little about abuse, even less about torture, having taken only one Psych class at Culver and then having focused more on the cute T.A. than on the class itself. Erik only required regular reminders to take his meds. He had an actual shrink for the hard stuff, for the nightmares about Loki. But Darcy has to do something. Bucky upheld his end of the deal, getting both him and her out of the diner alive. She now has to uphold hers.

Breathing in, she sits up a little straighter and tries to bring some sort of shape to her wind-blown and traumatized hair. The sticky residue she encounters, the remains of her French toast and eggs, makes her wince. Leaning over, Darcy digs into her bag and removes her pack of lavender face wipes. She pulls one out for herself then holds up the pack for Bucky. "Here. For your face."

Bucky turns from the window to peer at the pack, but he makes no move to take it.

Undaunted, Darcy places the pack on her lap and lifts the wipe that she freed. "Like this." She smoothes the cloth over her cheeks and forehead and, for good measure, down her throat too. The lavender banishes the lingering smell of the blood and she holds the wipe to her nose for a moment, soaking in the scent, before tossing it into the cup holder. "You don't have to," she says, offering the pack again to Bucky, "but you're kind of… bloody, and the Prius lacks tinted windows. It might be for the best."

Bucky stares at the pack. Darcy doesn't think that he'll take it, but then he reaches for it with his left arm. He winces as he does, freezing in place with his arm outstretched.

"Are you okay?"

His teeth clenched, Bucky eases back, the wipes in hand. "I'm not—"

"I didn't ask if you were compromised. I asked if you were okay."

He doesn't respond. The silence stretches on for so long that Darcy chances another glance in the rearview mirror. Bucky stares down at the pack in his lap, the fingers of his metal hand playing with the edge. His brow creases and he swallows hard. He works his jaw for a moment and then says, his voice soft, "Are…"

"What?"

"Are you?"

The question catches Darcy off guard. She feels Bucky watching her, the intensity returning to him and fixed now on her. Keeping her eyes focused on the road, she shifts in her seat and shrugs. "I wasn't the one who was stabbed. I'm—"

"Crying."

Her hands tighten on the steering wheel. She hadn't thought that he'd noticed, either here or by the side of the road, too wrapped up in his own bloody trauma to see anything else. But he sees now. Breathing in, Darcy tries to figure out if she's okay. Her thoughts twist and writhe, evading her grasp, and she abandons the pursuit for clarity, giving in to the scattered nature of her brain. "I'm… I don't know. Okay? Maybe. I almost saw the end of the world last year, but that was a cakewalk compared to this. So I'm dealing, I guess. I don't know. Mostly I'm just worried you're going to bleed to death in the backseat."

"I won't die."

"Oh really? And you know this how?"

"I've been stabbed before."

For the third time that evening, Bucky renders her completely silent. Darcy knows better than to ask if he's joking because she knows that he isn't, she knows that he can't, or that he won't let himself. Instead, she pulls in a deep breath and says as calmly as she can, "You weren't just stabbed. You were shot at and beaten up—"

"They didn't beat me up."

Darcy grits her teeth. "Then the pine tree did. Or the Hummer. Your cut's still bleeding and you can't even lean forward without wincing. You need to a go to a hospital."

"No."

Darcy slows for the approaching stoplight. She peers at Bucky again in the mirror, finds his face set and his hands clenched, but the worried slant of his brows softens the stubborn glare.

"Bucky…"

She hears a sharp intake of breath. His eyes widen. "Stop."

"I'm sorry—"

"No. _Stop_."

Darcy slams on the brakes. The Prius skids to a halt inches from a red convertible. She thinks it's the same one that blew past the diner before their fight and flight began. The driver, a young blonde woman, glares at Darcy in the rearview. She holds up an apologetic hand then twists in her seat to face Bucky. He's used half the wipes to clean his face and beard, or at least to dull the shock of red. It's enough for her to see how sallow his skin is, his wan complexion made more distinct by the thin line that he's pressed his mouth into. Narrowing her eyes, Darcy pulls herself up to her full height and says, her tone offering no room for argument, "You are going to a hospital."

"No."

"But—"

"_No_."

Darcy throws up her hands. "Fine. _Fine_.Bleed to death in the backseat. See if I care."

She twists back around and slumps in her seat to dodge his gaze in the mirror. She can't avoid the woman in the convertible though, who still glares at her. Shooting back up, Darcy gives the woman the finger. The woman scowls at her and returns the gesture then the light turns green and she shoots away. Darcy follows at a saner pace, both to avoid succumbing to her homicidal road rage and trigger-happy cops as well.

"I thought you said not to kill everyone who stared at you."

Darcy clenches the steering wheel and tries not to scream. "I wasn't going to kill her," she says, carefully enunciating each word.

"But you wanted to."

"Yes. Yes. Okay? Yes, I wanted to. I wanted to shove that little glow stick you gave me against her badly dyed head and press the trigger until she collapsed in a twitching, drooling mess at my feet. Then I wanted to point and laugh and dance a happy jig of joy. That's what driving does to people. It makes them crazy, so unless you want me to do the same to you, you'll stop with the commentary and just sit there quietly bleeding to death in the backseat."

Bucky opens his mouth, but Darcy holds up a hand and cuts off whatever contradiction he dared voice. "Unless the next words out of your mouth are 'Why, yes, Darcy, I _would_ like to go to the hospital so I don't die,' I would seriously suggest shutting the hell up."

He does, miraculously, leaning back against the seat with a scowl on his face. Whatever. Let him pout. She doesn't care. She said she'd help him remember, not be his guide to the frustrating minutiae of 21st century life. Let him fumble through that with Steve or Thor, with someone actually qualified to deal with the blood and the bullets and the blank, hollow stares. That person wasn't her. She was an intern, a current college dropout. She wasn't a savior, she wasn't a hero, and the thought of her trying to be either is so ludicrous at the moment that all Darcy can do is laugh.

She laughs until tears form in her eyes, until snot drips from her nose, until she can't tell anymore if she's laughing or crying. She knows that Bucky watches her, she feels the frown he sends her way, but rather than engage him in conversation, she lowers the driver's side window and breathes in the cool night air. The breeze soothes her frazzled nerves. After half a mile, she can ease her grip on the steering wheel. After another half, the tears start to slow and her breathing stabilizes. Darcy grabs the sleeve of her sweater to wipe the tears from her face when Bucky finally speaks.

"Here."

He holds up the package of face wipes. "You're kind of…" He pauses, searching for the right word. A faint frown pulls at his mouth as he stares at her.

"Deranged? Insane?"

"Wet," he settles for instead.

Darcy huffs out another laugh. "You're not wrong about that." She takes the package from him and retrieves another wipe. The wind intensifies the sensation, helping to bring clarity to her muddled mind. Bucky studies her as she revives, probably waiting to see if she'll freak out on him again, yell at him about tears and snot in addition to bleeding and windows. Letting out a slow breath, Darcy tosses this wipe into the cup holder alongside the first and prepares for Take 2.

"Thanks," she says, catching his eye in the mirror. "And sorry. I didn't mean to freak out at you. Again. It's been kind of a stressful day."

"At least you weren't stabbed."

She laughs, though she knows he didn't say it to be funny, humor still in the deadpan delivery, but then she sees it, a glimmer of something in his eyes. The glimpse makes her gasp. Her gasp makes him frown and the something, the flash of the man behind the machine, disappears, but it was there, it was there, she knows it was there.

"Are you… freaking again?"

Darcy shakes her head, not trusting her ability to speak. She bites down on her lip to tamp down on the crazy smile that wants to form, on the hope that flares within her that maybe she really can help him after all. Turning back to the road, she lifts a hand and powers up the Prius' navigation system. "Okay, so north's kind of vague as far as directions go. Did you have any specific place in mind, or—"

"Brooklyn."

It takes all of Darcy's willpower to remain calm, to simply nod and input the destination. She can ask him about it later, whether he goes to Brooklyn because he remembers it or if he just read about the city and its importance in his life somewhere else. Peeking at him again in the mirror, she finds that he stares out the window again, but this time she knows that he looks, she knows that he sees, that he watches and observes and takes everything in. Darcy eases down on the gas, pushing the limit of how fast she dares to go, spurred on by the thought that now they're running toward something even more than they're running from.

Forty minutes pass before she finally remembers Jane. "Shit."

"What?"

"_Shit._"

"_What?_"

Darcy leans over and grabs her bag. "Jane."

"Who?"

"Jane," Darcy says again, searching for her phone. "You know, the screaming girl you hung up on in the diner. I need to call her back."

"No."

Darcy stops her search and slowly raises her eyes to the mirror. "Excuse me?"

Bucky doesn't flinch from her glare, as nonplussed by her rage as he was by her insanity. "It's not safe," he says and she thinks he's striving for the same sort of patience that she previously used with him. She doesn't know whether she should be proud at his progress or offended at its direction at her.

"I know it's not safe," she says, reflecting his tone right back at him. "It'll get even less safe the longer I wait to call. Because Jane? She dates Thor. And I know we didn't get to the Thor part of the evening on account of the shootings and the stabbings and what not, so let me fill you in. Thor? He's a god. Like, a legit god. He's about a zillion years old and he has a magic hammer and, as badass as you are, he could crush your head in one hand."

Bucky scowls at that.

"He could," she says, resuming her search. "And he will. Because Jane will ask him too, and she'll do it because she probably thinks you've kidnapped me and that'll make her mad because I'm her best friend. And Thor will say yes because he's Jane's boyfriend and he's been really mopey the last six months about having nothing worthy to fight. So unless you want your head smashed in by a giant, Pop-Tart loving god, you'll let me call."

Bucky sits, mulish and glaring, but he voices no further objections. Finally finding her phone, Darcy turns it on. She cringes at the six missed calls and thirteen text messages that greet her, nearly all from Jane. A few are from Tony and one from a number she doesn't recognize, but she bypasses them all to go straight to Contacts. If she delayed any longer, Jane was going to be madder at her for forgetting to call than worried about her possibly being kidnapped or dead. Licking her lips, Darcy clicks on Jane's name and tries to steel herself for tiny brunette rage, as scary in its own way as the big bundle of brunet rage in the backset.

Jane answers, of course, on the first ring. "Darcy?"

"Hi."

The gasping sob of a sigh that reaches her over the phone tugs at Darcy. Her throat constricts and she bites down on her lip to keep the tears from forming in her eyes again. "It's okay," she says. "I'm okay. I mean, I've got French toast in my hair, but otherwise I'm good."

At that, Jane gives a weak laugh. "I tried calling you again, but no one answered and I—"

"I know. I'm sorry. I turned off my phone."

Silence greets her admission. Shit. _Shit_. Darcy can practically feel Jane narrow her eyes, all parts of her enormous brain activated and set now to suspicious. "Why did you do that?"

Darcy hesitates. In her hesitation, Jane pounces, releasing the floodgates she's probably barely kept at bay the last hour. "Darcy, what happened? Who was the man on the phone? We know you never made it to D.C., so where are you? Are you coming home? Are you sure you're okay? What—"

"I…"

"Darcy."

Darcy glances in the mirror. Bucky looks out the window, but she knows that he focuses on her, his mouth a tight line. He can probably hear Jane, his hearing likely as souped up as the rest of him. His claim about safety spins through her brain as she turns back to the road. Darcy knows she has nothing to fear from Jane or Thor, but Bucky doesn't, he doesn't know them, he barely even knows her, much less himself. Of course he doesn't think it's safe. He probably only considers her to be safe since she's so obviously _not _a spy. She doubts the Black Widow freaks out as much during gun battles as she has today.

Drawing in another breath, Darcy prepares again for Jane's rage. "I can't tell you."

"_What?_"

"I'm sorry, but I can't. I just called to say that I'm okay, that I haven't been shot or kidnapped or anything like that, so you don't need to send you-know-who thundering after me."

"Too late."

Darcy shifts the phone to her left ear and tries not to sigh. "Can't you call him back, send up a Thor-shaped bat signal or something?"

"He's not—" Jane pauses and pulls in a quick breath, her anxiety about Darcy giving way now to her normal exasperation. "We're at the airport. Tony helped us book a plane."

"Isn't that a little excessive? I mean, I know I forgot to call—"

"Forgot to call? Darcy, do you have any idea who you came across tonight?"

Darcy bristles at the reproach. "Uh, yeah, I do. Because I actually studied history, unlike some people."

"I don't mean who he was, Darcy. I mean who he is."

She doesn't look in the mirror, though she wants to, though every fiber of her being compels her to look, to see if the drop of dread sliding down her spine is justified. Instead, she keeps her eyes fixed on the road, on the approaching town, on the fellow cars on the road and the lights in the distance.

"Uh, no. That I don't happen to know."

Silence so taut that Darcy thinks she'll snap it if she exhales follows her confession. Then Jane hisses into the phone, "Oh my god. Are you with him right now?"

"Jane—"

"Get out. Now. Tase him or something. He's dangerous."

"I know—"

"Darcy, he's a Hydra assassin. He killed the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. And he tried to kill Steve. Steve's still in the hospital. This guy—"

"—is sitting right behind me."

"Oh my god."

Darcy can't help it. She looks in the mirror. She would never survive long in a scary movie, always needing to look, always needing to know. She'd walk down into that basement or out into that darkness at the first sign of a weird noise. So she looks in the mirror. At first, she sees nothing, night having fallen as they've driven north, but then they pass beneath a streetlamp and the light illuminates Bucky in the rearview. He stares at her as he stared at the pancakes, as he stared after he crawled from the wreck of the Hummer, but now he stares at her in the back of her rental car with a gun by his hand, and, at the sight, Darcy sees red.

"Oh _hell _no."

For the second time that hour, she slams on the brakes. The Prius screeches to a stop in the middle of the road. Unprepared for the sudden change, Bucky slides forward and nearly topples of the seat. His gun falls to the floor with a dull thud and his hand shoots out to brace himself against the window, but Darcy revs the engine and sends him crashing back into the seat again as the Prius shoots forward. "Uh huh. No way. You are going to snap out of zombie killer mode right now because you and I are going to have a conversation."

"Darcy? What—"

"Sorry, Jane. Not you and I. He and I. You I'll have to call back."

Switching off her phone, Darcy jerks the car into a parking lot for a Wal-mart. Bucky slams into the door and gives a hiss of pain as she careens around the store to the back of the lot. The part of her brain not currently in the midst of a stress-induced breakdown feels a twinge of pity for him and the additional battery that she subjects him to, but she ignores the twinge, stomps down on the brakes again, and finally sends Bucky to the floor as they skid to a stop in the back of the lot.

Darcy's unbuckled her seatbelt and shot out of the car before Bucky has even clawed his way back to the seat. She wrenches open the back door, her mouth open and primed for an epic rant about violations of trust and vows _not _to shoot her, when the sight of the blood pooled in the seat and smeared onto the window freeze her in place.

"Jesus Christ. I _asked _you if you were okay."

Bucky inches into the seat, his teeth clenched. "I—"

"Never mind. Just… sit here, okay? Sit and don't die."

Darcy shuts the door, careful now not to slam it so as not to jostle him further. Then she darts back into the car through her open door and reaches for her bag. "I'm going to get bandages and stuff. Food. I don't know. Just—"

"Don't die?"

She nods and starts to ease out of the car. As she does, she glances at him again and her stomach plummets at how pale he is, at the knuckles that stand stark and white on his clenched hand. He leans his head against the backseat and peers at her through narrowed eyes. They stare at each other a moment. He looks down and then back at her and his brows pull together in a frown, but he says nothing. The silence sends another drop of dread down her spine.

"I'll be ten minutes," she says, stepping into the lot. "Fifteen at the most. Well, maybe twenty. Wal-marts are _really _big. But then we'll find someplace to stop, okay?"

Bucky gives her the same small nod from before. Her throat constricts at the sight and she tries her best to breathe as she turns around and runs for the store.

In the store she continues to run, hitting medical supplies first, grabbing bandages and aspirin, cotton balls and Neosporin. She darts back for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide then heads to clothes, where she tosses in a basic pack of t-shirts followed by sweatpants and a hoodie, all in large and all in his current color scheme of black and white. She leaves clothes for food, where she dithers, a hitch in her chest from all the running. What do former war heroes and current Hydra assassins eat? Darcy thinks, but no answers come. She can't conceive of Bucky eating, though she met him in a diner, though she saw him with food. He never actually ate the food, so maybe he doesn't eat. Maybe Hydra just fed him intravenously, or he absorbed nutrients from the souls of all those that he slaughtered.

At the thought, Darcy closes her eyes. She leans her head against the shelf of bread as the pieces stitch together in her mind, the life of Bucky Barnes post-WWII, taken by Hydra after his fall and seemingly made to forget his life before, made into some twisted version of super soldier Steve, star and all. How was she supposed to help him remember his life before the war given what she knows about it now? She knows that he knows in some capacity. He recognized his name, he wanted to go to Brooklyn after all, but he doesn't _know_, not really. He doesn't remember. How would he react when he did? How would he deal with being coerced into a weapon, one sent to kill his former friend? Erik suffered a nervous breakdown from what he did when Loki took over his mind, from those that died when the Chitauri came through the portal he built, no matter the fact that he helped stop Loki in the end. How would Bucky react, his time with Hydra and his likely list of sins so much longer?

The possibilities unnerve Darcy. She tries to swallow past the lump in her throat, to still the shaking in her hands and the trembling in her legs. She would think of that later. Bucky needed to live in order to remember, and he needed food in order to live and the supplies in her cart and Darcy too, Steve out of commission and no one else crazy enough to take him on, so she pushes off the shelf and continues, pulling items down at random, nothing that required cooking or refrigeration. Some crackers and peanut butter. Some apples and Cliff bars. A few bottles of water and a package of chocolate chip cookies because the day had sucked and the night likely would too and she needed the comfort of chewy baked goods.

The cashier eyes her as she removes the items from her cart, as she requests two hundred dollars in cash back. She knows that she looks deranged, blood on her clothes and syrup in her hair, but thankfully, he says nothing, probably used to the deranged working retail. As she leaves, she checks the time, eighteen minutes in and out, hopefully quick enough.

Darcy rounds the store for the back of the lot, half expecting to see Hummers surrounding her car again, Bucky up and active and fighting to the death, but all is quiet. The quiet flusters her rather than calms. She drives the cart across the lot, clenching her teeth against the dismay rattling her bones alongside the push of the wheels over gravel. When she reaches the car, she peers in through the back windshield; Bucky sprawls across the backseat, his eyes closed. He doesn't stir as she shoves the bags of supplies inside the trunk, as she slams the lid shut and climbs back into the car. With shaking hands, she grabs her phone and searches for nearby motels, locating one suitably small and out of the way after a few minutes.

She glances into the mirror as she fastens her seatbelt. The cliché applies, Bucky looking softer, younger, more like him, passed out now than when he was awake. But then she sees it, a wipe in his hand and fresh blood on the cloth. Twisting, she finds that he tried to clean the blood from the seat and from the window too. She gapes at the sight, at the implications they convey, that he thought she didn't care about him bleeding to death in the backset, just that the blood wasn't seen, no tint to the windows and the danger of discovery dangling over them at every moment. Darcy bites her lip, but she can't stop the tears from coming, not at this. She turns back around and pulls her legs to her chest, giving in, sobs wrenching from her chest at the tragedy of his life, at his desperation for aid and his dependence on her, at her inability to help and her delusion that she could, that she could save him as he had saved her, that thought a fantasy, nothing more than a futile hope from a woman too blind to see.


	4. Chapter 4

AN: Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback for this story! It's been tremendous. There's a bit more adult language in this section as well as some nudity. I have about three more sections planned for the story. I hope everyone likes them! :D

That Which You Seek

Part Four

By: Wynn

As she stares down at Bucky, still passed out in the backseat, Darcy is reminded of the old saying: let sleeping dogs lie. She wants nothing more than to let this sleeping dog lie, both for the pain that he's endured and also for the fact that she was unable to divest him of his knife and one of his guns. Given his previous reactions to other surprising things, pancakes, mini-vans, lavender face wipes, scaring him awake would likely lead to bloodshed and likely hers. But he hasn't responded to her calling his name and she couldn't very well leave him lying in the parking lot of this crap motel. Even the people here would be alarmed at the sight of a metal-armed assassin passed out in a pool of his own blood in the backset of a Prius, so drawing in a deep breath, Darcy prepares to wake Crouching Tiger, Sleeping Ninja.

The electric prod slides in her sweaty hands. It wasn't much, but hopefully it would be enough to snap Bucky out of his stupor and also out of zombie killer mode if that was how he awoke. She pulls in another breath and does a few preparatory stretches. She considers reciting a prayer or two to bolster her chances, but her grip on faith is as tenuous as her grip on sanity at the moment, so God would probably smite her down for her blasphemy should she make the attempt. Besides, Thor was already on his way. Darcy only needed to last the night until he arrived. What else could go wrong between now and then?

She looks at Bucky.

Better not to answer that question.

Easing behind the open back door, Darcy raises the prod high into the air. She takes a moment to make sure that her fingers are off the trigger and then she brings it down hard onto the roof of the car.

"Wake up!"

He does, in an instant, his knife in his hand. Yelping, Darcy drops behind the door. She fumbles for the trigger, praying now, only to Bucky rather than God. "It's me. It's Darcy. It's me. Don't stab. It's—"

"Darcy?"

She peers around the door, the prod clenched in her hands. Bucky sits, his knife at the ready, but she sees no murder in his eyes. Just confusion. At the sight of her, he lowers the knife. At the sight of _that_, Darcy shucks out a soft sigh and lays the prod on the ground. The universe had granted her a reprieve.

Finally.

"I rented a room," she says as she stands. "Bought some supplies. I thought—"

Bucky nods before she finishes. He starts to slide from the car, but stops and glances down at the floorboard. When she sees his brow crease, she steps forward to clarify.

"I already took our stuff to the room. Your guns too."

She points to the door of their room, to the faint light visible at the edge of the curtains. Bucky nods again and finishes his slide from the car. He sways a bit as he stands. Darcy reaches out, but she stops herself from touching him. This time he notices. He stiffens and starts to move away, but she darts forward, into his path.

"I… Do you need help? Because—"

Bucky shakes his head, avoiding her gaze. He eases to the left and shuffles past her, listing a bit to the right but steady on his feet. Darcy rubs a hand across her face as he walks away. He was like a goddamned alley cat, desperate and deadly and impossible to predict. Would he warm to her touch and settle down, finally feeling safe, or would he use his knife to slice off her encroaching hand, sending her a hiss and a scowl for her efforts? Her answer varied from moment to moment, changing so fast sometimes she got whiplash.

The scrape of boots on gravel stops. Looking up, Darcy finds Bucky halfway to the room, his gun in his hand and his head tilted in her direction. She knows that he waits for her, though he doesn't look at her. Grabbing the prod, Darcy shuts and locks the door and then follows him to the room. Bucky lets her unlock the door, but he enters first, his gun raised. She considers telling him again that she's already been inside, that she's made multiple trips to and from the car without encountering any death or murder, but the ghosts of the night stalk him, not her, so she lets him look, fastening the door behind them instead.

The room is standard, lit by a small lamp between two double beds. A table and lone chair sit before the window, a small dresser and an ancient television line the left wall, and an open sink juxtaposes a small bathroom in the rear of the room. Darcy tosses the prod onto her bed, the one closest to the window. Her body calls for sleep, but she trudges on, making her way to the back. Bucky enters the small bathroom. As Darcy stops by the sink, he peers behind the curtain then, finally, lowers his gun. She starts to take the medical supplies from the bag, arranging them in a neat row on the counter, stalling for time, though she knows that she shouldn't, Bucky likely still bleeding and in need of aid. She feels him watch her, but when she finally brings herself to turn, to face the cat in question, he peers at the shower, the gun still gripped in his hand.

"Do you—"

"No."

Darcy grits her teeth but forces herself to relax. "You don't even know what I was going to ask."

"I can bandage myself. I know how."

"Good. Because open wounds make me gag. I was going to ask if you wanted to shower first."

Bucky tenses at the question. His eyes flit to the wall, past the wall to the door, beyond the door to the world outside where nameless enemies lurked, ready to pounce. Pity darts through her at the sight, Bucky dirty and bloodied, backed into a corner with his hackles raised. Darcy eases over the threshold, stopping when his eyes snap to her. This time, though, she doesn't raise her hands in surrender. Instead, she says, "I know it's not safe. Believe me. But I paid for the motel in cash and I tried to pick one that wouldn't have online records. I even used a fake name. And I seriously doubt that the people who are after you have already regrouped enough to try again. Not after the diner."

She waits, but Bucky gives no response. Taking his silence as encouragement enough, Darcy slides all the way into the bathroom. "Besides," she says, wrinkling her nose at the blood in his beard and the lank state of his hair, "you kind of need a shower, dude. Like, a lot."

That draws his attention back toward her. He takes in her sticky clothes and tangled hair, dotted by bits of egg and French toast, and slowly raises a brow.

Darcy narrows her eyes. "Okay. Yes, I need one too, but blood trumps egg, so in you go."

She waves him toward the shower with one hand while holding out the other for his gun. Bucky glances at the hand and then at her, his expression the same, surly and skeptical. Trying not to sigh, Darcy looks at the gun and says, "You can't take it with you, much as you might want to."

Bucky makes no move to give her the gun. Instead, he looks back over his shoulder at the shower. As he stares, an uncomfortable thought takes hold in Darcy's mind. She shifts, unable to let it go. Opening her mouth, she reconsiders, closes it, then opens it again, finally plowing on because that's what she does: she says the things that probably shouldn't be said, especially to people who occasionally want to kill you.

"Do you know how—"

"I know how to shower," he says, sounding so offended as he turns back around that she throws up her hands.

"Well, how was I supposed to know? You didn't seem to know how to pancake earlier, so your skill set is kind of murky at the moment."

A beat passes and then Bucky raises his other brow. "How to pancake?"

Darcy throws her head back and gives in to her sigh. "_Dude_—"

"Here. Don't freak out again."

Darcy lowers her head to find Bucky with his arm outstretched, his gun laid flat on the palm of his hand. She starts to reach for it then what he says processes and her jaw drops. "Excuse me? I was _totally _justified in my last freak out. You were going to _shoot _me—"

Bucky clenches his jaw.

"—_after_ you said that you wouldn't, so—"

"You know him."

"I— What? Who?"

Bucky lowers his arm. His whole body is tense, vibrating from whatever he struggles to reveal or conceal. She's not sure which. He fixates on a spot about half a foot above her head, opens his mouth, breathes in, snaps his mouth shut and swallows, then he steels himself as she had before, not to say something stupid though, to say something odd, something foreign and puzzling, a relic from a time long past.

"Steve."

It takes a moment for understanding to hit her, for her brain to dredge up what he undoubtedly heard from Jane over the phone, her claim about how he had tried to kill Steve. Not Captain America. Steve. A first name for the friendship that all of them share. And how had Darcy responded to that revelation? She had used the car to disarm him, to weaken him further. No wonder he didn't want to relinquish his gun. Bucky thought she had wanted to hurt him, or to get Thor here to hurt him. The thought causes bile to rise in her throat. She had thought that he wanted to kill her. He had thought that she was going to kill him. And there were actually people out there who wanted to kill the both of them.

The thoughts make her shake her head. She didn't know how the Avengers dealt with this, constantly having people who wanted to kill you and, also, sometimes wanting to kill each other. Darcy closes her eyes and rubs a hand again over her brow. Whatever Coulson had thought he'd seen in her in London had clearly been a delusion because all she feels is exhaustion at the prospect of untangling this messy knot of misconceptions.

Opening her eyes, she finds Bucky peering at her, his body tilted away. Yet he doesn't grip his gun; he just holds it between loose fingers. Grabbing hold of this hope, Darcy says to him, her voice low and her hands in plain sight, "I'm not going to hurt you. I don't care what you've done. To Steve or to anyone else. You're not… you right now. Not until you remember. And even then I doubt you're going to be able to say that you wanted to do what you've done. So you have nothing to fear from me." She pauses then and sends him a small smile. "Except maybe some more freak outs. But I'll try to keep those to a minimum."

Bucky regards her quietly. He swallows again and the worried tilt returns to his brows. "Your friend—"

"Who? Jane?"

He nods.

"Okay. Yes, Jane can get a little aggressive. But she's also easily distracted. Just mention wormhole to her and she'll soften right up. And Thor, he _could_ squash your head with one hand, but he won't. He and Steve are total bros, and despite whatever happened between you and Steve, the last thing he'd want is you dead, so the only thing you'll have to watch out for from Thor is excessive hugs."

The suspicion remains, despite her claims, underlined now by what she missed in the car, the sharp edge of fear. Darcy lets Bucky look his fill. She tries not to squirm beneath the intensity of his gaze, tries to remain open and forthright and possessed only of the desire to help. Seconds pass. The drop of dread collects again at the base of her spine. She feels the need to flee as she did in the wake of their first standoff, but then Bucky releases a slow breath and the tension finally leaves his body. He closes his eyes, and she wonders for a moment if he's going to cry, but all he does is swallow again and draw in a gasp of air.

Darcy takes a moment to do the same. "Are we… okay?"

Bucky nods. He opens his eyes and does something to the gun before holding it out to her again. She takes it from him, a question in her eyes, and he clarifies. "Turned the safety off."

Darcy quirks a brow at his attempt to lure her into combat with a dud gun, but Bucky just shrugs. "You had the shock prod."

She can't help but laugh at that. "So I did. Why don't we both swear again _not_ to kill each other? And mean it this time."

He nods. In his eyes, she sees the same spark of life that she'd seen in the car, the gleam that had greeted her from many a history book. Darcy waits for it to fade, to die as embers in a long cold fire, but the gleam holds and so does her hope. She moves to the sink, hearing, as she does, Bucky unzip his armor. Grabbing the few toiletries that she pulled from her bag, she turns back toward him, intending to give them to him, to escape then to the outer room, to lie down and close her eyes and not think for a few minutes, wanting nothing more than to clear her mind of blood and guns and fire and grenades. But as she turns back toward Bucky, the sight of the bruises blooming across his chest and back, six in all, the size of baseballs and punctuated by the tacky scab of his stab wound, stops her in her tracks. Beneath the bruises and blood, other scars stand stark against his skin. She'd seen them in the diner, at a distance. Now, closer to Bucky than before, they horrify and all she can do is gape.

Bucky drapes his armor over the towel rod. He reaches for the bottles in her hands, seemingly oblivious to her shock. She watches as he sets the bottles by the tub, as he perches on the toilet to unlace his boots. The sight of a fresh trickle of blood from his stab wound returns to Darcy her voice.

"Does it… Don't they hurt?"

"Yes."

She blinks at the soft admission. "Then why—"

Bucky starts on the right boot, his movements swift and precise. "Pain distracts."

"What—"

"The mission matters."

The mission matters. The _mission_ matters. The mission matters, so fight one against twenty. The mission matters, so jump from a car driving sixty miles per hour down a dark road. The mission matters, so just sit quietly in the backseat of a rental car and allow yourself to bleed to death.

Darcy clenches her jaw. She tries to stay calm, to not freak out, to not freak him out, but she hears her rage in her voice when she speaks again.

"Not anymore."

At that, Bucky stills. He sits hunched over the toilet, his gaze fixed on the cracked tile floor and that goddamned look in his eyes that makes Darcy want to scream and cry, to wrap him in a blanket and run away screaming, to find the people who did this to him and shock them with the cattle prod until their eyes rolled back into their heads, until they foamed at the mouth, until they dropped twitching and screaming at her feet only for her to press down harder with the prod until their flesh burned and she whispered to them, "Sorry, dude. The mission matters."

She kneels down before Bucky, forces him to meet her eyes. "I don't care what those assholes told you before. You're a person. Your name is Bucky Barnes, and you matter more than any goddamned mission. So the next time someone tells you to suck it up and to do something you don't want to do, you just look them right in the eye and say, 'Fuck you.'"

Silence follows, in her opinion, her rather rousing speech. Bucky stares at her and she wonders if she'll have to explain the concept of cursing to him too, if he forgot everything due to Hydra, but then his mouth twitches and she nearly gasps as a crooked smile appears on his face.

"пошел на хуй."

"What?"

"It's Russian." His eyes shine as he explains, as he surprises her once more. "Fuck you."

Darcy leans back on her heels. She studies him a moment and then the pieces slide together. "That's what you said in the parking lot. To the Hans Gruber with the megaphone."

Bucky nods.

Darcy should have known, though she couldn't hear him then, his subsequent actions declaration enough: Bucky lifting his gun and blowing the shit out of megaphone man. She feels a slow smile spread across her face as she looks at him. "You're the mission. Remembering who you are."

Bucky nods again.

They stare at each other in the quiet of the bathroom. Darcy feels relief wash over her, bright and fizzy, like carbonation, like a sparkler on a hot summer night. She bites down on her lip, but she can't stop the goofy grin from coming, the hope that bubbles within. She shakes her head and turns away, preparing to rise, to let him shower and finally to let herself flop face-first onto the bed, but then he touches her, his fingertips light on her shoulder, and she freezes, her heart in her throat.

"And you," he says. "You matter."

Darcy looks back at him. Bucky drops his hand as he drops his gaze. She watches as his brow creases, as he tenses and swallows again. After a moment, he looks back at her, and this time he holds the stare. Blood still stains his cheeks and gums him beard, but his eyes gleam in the stark light, reflecting to her not her own emotions as before, but his own. She recalls the diner, the goons rushing toward her, Bucky launching himself over the Hummer to land between her and them. He was shot then, because of her. He bears the bruises from those bullets on his chest, the consequences of her hysterical demand for him to save her life. Her mouth flattening into a thin line, Darcy pushes herself to her feet. "Not anymore. You don't— You got me out of that diner and I'm grateful, but that's not why I'm here. So no more bullets for Darcy, okay?"

Bucky stares at the wall, his jaw tight. She opens her mouth to try to explain, how this is about him, not her, how she's already seen such sacrifice with Thor in the desert, dying from the Destroyer, with him striding into the evil death cloud to stop Malekith, and how she doesn't want to see it again, but she stops before she starts, Bucky slowly rising from the toilet. He looms before her, nearly blocking out the bare bulb above. The look in his eyes makes her tense, anger hardening his gaze. Anger at her.

"Bucky…"

His name dies on her lips as he leans in close, as he looks her dead in the eye and says, his voice soft above the pounding of her heart, "Fuck you."

Her face flushes and her hands clench, but before Darcy can respond, Bucky turns from her to rip the shower curtain aside. At the dismissal, she spins on her heel and stomps from the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. "Same to you, pal!" she shouts back through the door. Something cracks in response, and Darcy considers storming back into the bathroom to yell at him about how _she's_ going to have to pay for his little temper tantrum, but they had just reached a détente and she seriously doesn't want him reconsidering his renewed stance on not shooting and/or stabbing her, so she continues on, choosing to kick at her overnight bag instead.

The pipes squeal as Bucky turns on the shower. Darcy flops down onto her bed and tries not to scream. She needed a drink. She needed seven drinks. She needed to sleep for a week and take an hour-long shower and find somebody else to take her place as babysitter for Bucky Barnes. The longer they stayed together, the likelier it would be that one of them would kill the other, and she doesn't want that, no matter how many expletives they hurled in rage. Why couldn't he understand? Darcy doesn't want to die. But she doesn't want Bucky to die either, especially not for her. What positive would be in that? That she'd get to live with the same sort of guilt that plagues Steve and Thor? That she'd go mad like Erik? No, thank you. Not for her. Of course, Bucky probably doesn't want that either, having her die in the attempt to help him, so why wouldn't he be pissed at her for essentially ordering him to let her die if that push came to shove?

That thought, this night, the entirety of her life right now, all of it makes her groan. Darcy closes her eyes and focuses on the rush of the water in the bathroom. She tries to let it wash over her and soothe her frazzled nerves as the cool wind had before, but her nerves remain frazzled and her body on edge. She gets up and paces, sits down and stares out the window, pulls out her iPad, puts it away again, then returns to the bed, kicking the cattle prod to the floor as she does. At least they should be safe from outside harm for a few hours, long enough, hopefully, for reinforcements to arrive. She needed them, her own attempts to talk to Bucky failing at every turn. Maybe she could convince him to see Steve in the hospital. Or to talk to Thor. Everyone liked talking to Thor. He—

Darcy tenses as the shower stops. She had anticipated more time, at least a few more minutes to regroup and fortify herself for Take 3, but why would Bucky take a long shower? She doubts that Hydra allowed him such a luxury. The army probably hadn't either, even if Bucky had run with Captain America and likely had more in the way of supplies than most. Sitting, she tries to think, to come up with a plan, to gauge the anger within her and decide whether she wants to continue the fight or to flee to the bathroom as soon as he stepped forth. His tension by the car flashes into her mind, and her lingering anger fades. The last thing either of them needed was for Bucky to think she was afraid of him, that she was avoiding him. Darcy stands, the shower curtain scrapes again across the rod, then her eyes fall onto the bags of food that she'd purchased from Wal-mart. Darting over, she grabs the package of cookies and peels open the lid. No better olive branch than food, especially food of the baked good variety. She extracts a cookie for herself and makes her way to the bathroom just as the door opens and Bucky walks out.

Naked.

"Holy shit."

Bucky ignores both her and the open package of cookies. He stops before the sink, his jaw clenched tight, and starts to paw through the medical supplies. Darcy blinks once and averts her gaze. She shoves half of the cookie into her mouth, thinks about turning around, but remains rooted in place. If the man before her were Bucky, one hundred percent, she'd look and gawk and ogle to her heart's content. Hell, if what she'd studied about Bucky was true, he'd _want _her to look, he'd probably put on a show and double dog dare her. But he wasn't Bucky, not yet, so Darcy tries not to look. She keeps her eyes fixed squarely on the juncture where wall meets ceiling as he opens packages, as he turns on the sink and hisses in pain. Darcy hears the fizzy sound of peroxide. She eats the rest of the cookie, shuffles in place, and waits to see if he has any intention of putting on pants. When he shows no inclination, she holds out the package of cookies and says, "Do you want one?"

"No."

'Of course not' is on the tip of her tongue, but Darcy squashes it, trying to reconcile rather than divide. "You should. It's kind of my way of apologizing. Lewis women know no other."

Bucky says nothing in response. Darcy hears nothing too, no further sounds from the sink, only the crinkle of plastic in her hand and the soft hum of the ancient air conditioner. The silence persists and still she tries to resist, to do the right thing, what Steve would do or Thor, but she's not Steve and she's not Thor and her curiosity consumes her after a few more seconds.

Perhaps she, rather than Bucky, is the cat.

Turning toward him, Darcy finds Bucky leaning into the sink. His hands grip the edge of the counter. She thinks she hears the fake wood creak beneath his metal hand as she moves closer. She sets the package of cookies in the corner past the cotton balls and tries to catch his eye in the mirror, but Bucky doesn't look at her. He keeps his head ducked, and she's reminded of a dog, one fearing the swat of a newspaper or perhaps something worse. At the sight, another piece of the Bucky puzzle slides into place. How else could Hydra keep someone like him in line, as strong as he is and as deadly? How else could they control him if they didn't squash any disobedience swiftly and violently?

The thought makes her nauseous. Her hands itch for the cattle prod again. Breathing in, she grabs the roll of gauze, fiddling with the edge, trying to burn away her anger at him and at Hydra and at herself too, for all of them and their various attempts to burn the bridge that she keeps trying to build. Licking her lips, she places the gauze back on the counter and then says, abruptly, "I don't really do this well. This whole talking thing. Or I do. I mean, Jane says sometimes that that's the only thing I do well. But usually when I talk, it's just sass and random references, but neither of those works here. So… I fail. Epically. And, no offense, dude, but you're not exactly a shining star with communication either."

She thinks she sees a brow twitch in the mirror.

"Also, both of us seem to be a bit on the stubborn side. I say don't die, you say no. You say don't die, I say no. Then you say fuck you and I say fuck you too."

She glances at him. She sees his grip ease on the counter.

"Excellent use of fuck you, by the way. I would take credit for it, but you were in the army. You probably know how to curse in a dozen languages and a variety of hand gestures."

His eyes find hers in the mirror.

Darcy latches onto the look and plows forward. "Why don't we try again? Neither one of us wants to kill the other one, andneither one of us wants the other person to die, either for that person in particular or in general. We're both here to help you remember and, also, possibly, the more I keep hearing about Hydra, to wreak vengeance against those who made you forget."

Bucky blinks at that.

Darcy just shrugs, trying to play it cool. No need to telegraph her intense need to commit murder at what he had endured. "Driving's not the only thing that wakes the dragon."

Bucky frowns at the reference, as she figured he would. But baby steps. Waving a hand, she says to him, "I'll explain later. For now, why don't we shake on it?"

Twisting towards him, she holds out her hand. Bucky looks at it a long moment, so long that she wonders if he understands the gesture, probably not a whole lot of a need for shaking hands as an assassin, but she won't ask, his anger at her shower faux paus still fresh in her mind. Instead, Darcy lowers her hand and turns for the cookies, about to offer him one to him again when he finally speaks.

"Okay."

She smirks at the soft assent. "And here I was starting to think that the only word you knew was 'no.'"

"No."

Grin widening, Darcy turns back to Bucky. He holds out his hand to her, his real one. Water drips from his hair and beard, clumps his eyelashes together into sharp, dark points. Beyond the points, eyes bright with amusement wait for her. Darcy swallows at the sight. Her thirteen-year-old self stirs at the glimpse of the man behind the terse curtain; she squashes it down, recalling the mission. He cocks a brow at her hesitation, but not in confusion this time. To double dog dare her. Her adolescent self rises again. Darcy kicks her aside, straightening her shoulders. She extends her hand once more to Bucky, steeling herself against herself. And against him. A beat passes and then his palm touches hers. Darcy expects it to be cool, but it's not, he's warm, his skin roughened by calluses. Bucky closes his fingers around hers. His grip is light, far from the sure hold he uses for weapons. She knows it's deliberate, his eyes fast on her face to observe any sign of pain. She looks away at the thought, overcome, but she looks _down_, right at Bucky, Jr. Darcy starts and jerks her eyes back up to the ceiling. She feels a flush start to spread through her body, and she extricates her hand from his, needing to go walk away and die.

"I, uh, I bought you pants," she says, easing back. "Sweatpants. Nothing fancy. And some shirts. And a jacket. A hoodie. With a hood." Kicking herself again, Darcy collects her bag; she looks anywhere in the room but at him. "They're in the bag. Over, um, there." She points, but Bucky doesn't look. He watches her, his gaze, as always, focused and intent upon her. "So, you know, when you're done, you can, um, put them on. That would be—" Good? Bad? Nice? Lame? "Swell." Darcy bumps against the bathroom door. Shifting to the left, she eases back over the threshold, pausing a moment before she shuts the door. She needs to say something, something profound and meaningful to mark this official beginning to their sure to be epic partnership, but she catches sight of him again before she can. He leans against the sink, his arms folded over his chest, his head tilted to the side as he looks at her, and Darcy can't tell if his brows are raised in pity at her fumbling or in amusement. Her brain blanks at either possibility, so all she can summon by way of a conclusion is, "So, uh. Bye."

She ducks back into the bathroom then and shuts the door, and beyond the beige varnish and thin plywood, she swears that she hears him laugh.


	5. Chapter 5

**AN: Thank you so much to everyone who has left some feedback or has followed/favorited this story. I'm still in awe by the response. A few lovely people have made fanart for the story, so if you're on Tumblr, go check out the Bucky x Darcy thread to see them. Thank you again to everyone, and I hope you enjoy this section. :D  
**  
That Which You Seek

Part Five

By: Wynn

Darcy stays in the shower so long that Bucky knocks on the door to ask if she's died. She bellows back, "Yes," and continues on, determined to remain until the hot water fades, until the steam leeches the tension from her body, until she knows for sure that she can face the possibility of Bucky Jr. again while still retaining power over her brain. She needed this because she figured he'd make another appearance, Bucky alarmingly casual about clothing. Darcy even thinks that she could do the same, just stroll from the bathroom buck-ass nude, without him batting an eye. She doesn't know if that's a good or a bad thing, though she's inclined to say bad, the Bucky of old notorious as a ladies man.

The thought makes her close her eyes, another reminder of the damage done to him by Hydra and the long road he had before him. She knows he won't have to walk it alone. Someone, eventually, if Tony or Thor hadn't done so already, will tell Steve. And Darcy hadn't been lying before about Thor and his hugs. The big guy had so many issues about the death of Loki that Darcy can see him dedicating himself to Steve, to help him help Bucky, to try to save _this_ wayward brother when he had been powerless to save his own. And with Thor came Jane. Tony had been unleashing the full-court press upon Jane to get her to move back to the States, to funnel her research through Stark Industries. He'd likely turn the wooing up to eleven with the death of S.H.I.E.L.D. And if Jane came, would she follow? Darcy had followed her to England, had tried to build a life there. Or had she? Her life was Jane's, just an offshoot, really. Normally, she didn't mind, Jane doing important work. Or maybe she did. She had come to interview with S.H.I.E.L.D. after all.

At that, Darcy opens her eyes. Thoughts of later could wait. She needed food now and sleep, she needed not to tempt fate and Bucky by remaining any longer in the shower. He had already done enough damage snapping the soap dish off the wall in his rage at her. She didn't need him bursting in, guns blazing, to slay the water demons that held her captive.

Turning off the shower, Darcy steps from the tub to towel off. Her eyes fall again to the neat pile of clothes in the corner of the room, Bucky having lined his boots up against the wall and placed his folded pants on top. The creases are perfect, and she wonders if it's a remnant from the army or a requirement from Hydra. Her gaze drifts to her overnight bag, to the random clothes that she'd stuffed inside, no regard for wrinkles or order. Digging in now, she pulls out leggings and a giant sweater, what she intended to wear on the plane ride home. Though she figures they're safe for the night, best not to risk running for her life in polka dot pajamas. Hydra didn't need any extra help in their targeting. She looks at Bucky's armor as she pulls on her clothes. They shot just fine.

At the door, Darcy pauses. She hears nothing beyond, but then she's been in the bathroom at least a half an hour. Bucky likely finished his ministrations long ago. Hopefully he tended to his nudity as well. Cracking open the door, Darcy peeks out. He's not by the sink so she leans out further to peer around the corner into the rest of the room. She finds him in the chair by the window, his weapons arrayed on the table before him. He wears the sweatpants but nothing else. Darcy will take the small victory. At least she won't have to spend the rest of the night with her head craned up toward the ceiling.

"You broke the shock prod," he says by way of greeting as she finally leaves the bathroom.

Darcy shrugs as she wrings water from her hair. "Hydra can bill me."

She hears a sigh. The sound is so familiar that Darcy actually checks to make sure Jane isn't sitting in the corner of the room, frowning in exasperation with her. "You need a weapon," he says, drawing his attention back toward him. "Your taser's not enough."

"Let's be realistic, dude. The only person I was going to shock with that thing was me. Or you." She kneels down to gather the bags of food. "Besides, I like the taser. It's long distance."

"So's a gun."

Darcy gives him a look. Bucky returns the look. A small part of her crows in triumph at the increasing glimpses of self from him. The other, larger, part of her narrows her eyes. "Not going to happen."

His nostrils flare in frustration. "You need—"

"—to eat," she says as she stands. "And so do you. None of those are going to be any help if we pass out from starvation before we can even lift them."

Bucky scowls but relents, gathering the guns as she moves to the table. Darcy plops the bags down and only thinks now about plates and cutlery. How the hell were they going to eat the peanut butter without a knife to scoop it out? Shaking her head, she bypasses the jar to pull out the other items. She arranges them on the table between them, an apple and bottle of water each, the Cliff bars piled in the center alongside the crackers and her opened bag of Doritos. Bucky props the broken prod and his guns on the air conditioner by the window, leaving one behind on the table. To that, Darcy just shrugs. Small victories. At least she knows now it's not for her.

Turning, she makes her way back to the sink to grab some tissues and the package of cookies. As she returns, she sees Bucky peering down into the bag of Doritos, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Hey! No judging until you've tried. And even then no judging. Doritos are the food of the gods."

Bucky arches a brow.

"Okay, so technically meat, beer, and processed baked goods are the food of the gods. But still, respect the Dorito. They're what got me through my first semester at college."

The suspicion fades. Somewhat. Darcy places the cookies by the crackers and pulls out a few tissues. She watches Bucky reach into the bag. He pulls out a chip and, at the sight of it, frowns again.

She bites down on the smile that wants to form. "What?"

"Is it…"

"What?"

"…supposed to be this color?"

Darcy snorts. "Yeah, it is. Welcome to the twenty-first century, dude. We've got all the fake food you could want in every color of the rainbow and then some."

Bucky stares at the chip another moment before taking a tentative bite. She can't decipher his expression as he chews, but she understands the meaning of his hand closing around the bag and drawing it toward him as he sits down.

"Ha! Told you. Respect the Dorito."

His mouth twitches. Darcy sits on the bed perpendicular to Bucky. She hands him a few of the tissues and then reopens the package of cookies. They eat quietly, Bucky from the Doritos, Darcy from the cookies. Steve will probably give her the patented Captain glare at so quickly corrupting the taste buds of his BFF, but Darcy doesn't care. Bucky needed something nice, something normal, particularly something good to eat, Darcy unable to let go of the idea that Hydra fed him intravenously or by osmosis or something.

She looks at him as he pulls another chip from the bag. He had pushed his hair back behind his ears, likely to treat the cut on his forehead. Darcy eyes the small pink line. It no longer bled. She wants to ask him if he disinfected it, if he put the Neosporin on, but she holds her tongue. He said that he knew how to bandage himself. She has to trust him, his body proof enough of his prior need for bandaging. Her eyes drift down to his chest, to the bandage over his stab wound and the gauze wrapped tight around his body.

"It's healing."

Darcy jerks her eyes up to his, but Bucky doesn't look at her. He stares out the window, through the crack between the curtains. She wonders briefly how he knew that she was looking, but she doesn't ask, chalking it up to super spy DNA. Instead, she says, "Can I ask you something?"

Bucky tilts his head toward her, his eyes still fixed on the window. She interprets the gesture as yes.

"In the car, you said you were stabbed before. Does that mean you remember? Not everything, but, you know, some stuff."

Bucky tenses, his hand poised over the chip bag. She watches as he lowers the bag, slowly. His brows draw together, his eyes again clouding. Darcy wants to kick herself for pushing, for not leaving well enough alone. Laying the cookies on the table, she leans toward him and says, "I'm sorry. We don't have to… I just thought, you know, talking might help. Might spark your memory or something."

Bucky stares at the bag.

"No worries." She reaches for her water, forces herself to sound breezy and bright. "We'll just eat and—"

"Pancakes."

"We don't have any."

"No—" His mouth flattens into a thin line as he turns toward her. "I remember them. I think… someone made them from me."

"Oh. _Oh_." Another puzzle piece slots into place. "That's why you were at the diner."

Bucky nods.

Darcy gives a slow nod of her own. "We could go tomorrow, if you want." At the tilt of his head, she clarifies. "Obviously not _there_, but that diner's not the only place that sells pancakes. We can go and eat." Her eyes flit down to his chest. "You'd have to put a shirt on though."

Bucky leans back in his chair, his eyes bright. "I can't."

It takes every ounce of strength within Darcy to restrain the impulse to ogle, to keep her eyes locked on his. She shifts on the bed. She twists the water bottle in her hands. And then she asks, proud at how sensible she sounds, "Why is that?"

Bucky reaches up with his real hand to scratch the back of his neck. She wonders if he's doing it on purpose, to distract her, his chest moving in interesting ways as he shifts. Before she can decide though, he drops his hand only to lift it again and point. "They don't fit."

Turning, Darcy finds two of the shirts she bought folded neatly by the television. The third lies draped over the other two.

"It tore. When I was trying to get it off."

Darcy blinks. And blinks again. She stares at the shirts, trying not to laugh or drool at his clothing woes because he sounded genuinely remorseful. And confused. Which made sense as she doubts that he's worn much other than his armor or some other variation thereof for the past seventy years. Cheap cotton wouldn't stand a chance against him.

"Is it… okay?"

"It's okay," she says, turning back toward him. She flashes him a small smile. "We can get more. Something in your size. And I can keep these. Or give them to Steve. He seems to like his shirts insanely tight."

Bucky stiffens at the mention of Steve.

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

He shrugs, but he also turns away again, back to the window. Darcy unscrews her water and takes a drink, searching for something to say to smooth over her latest gaffe. The cookies catch her eye, but she dismisses the notion. Bucky didn't need her shoving food at him every time they found themselves in an emotional crisis. Her eyes drift back toward him, no idea spontaneously generating to save her. His right hand lay on the table in a tight fist. A drop of water slid down his back from the hair curling at the nape of his neck. As she stares, curiosity seizes hold of her. Darcy resists, determined not to be the stupid cat. She reaches for another cookie to prevent her mouth from acting independent of her will, but the idea winds its way from her brain despite her efforts and bursts forth with all the grace of a dancing sloth: "Do you, uh, if you want, you know, maybe, to talk about, in some way, perhaps, do you, um, possibly, remember him? Remember Steve, I mean."

The verbal diarrhea elicits a frown from Bucky equal parts pity and what-the-fuck. Darcy feels her face heat as he looks at her. Trying not to scowl, she places the bottle on the table and snatches the Doritos bag from him. "I told you," she says, shoving a hand inside. "I suck at this."

To her surprise, Bucky shakes his head. Darcy stares at him, her eyes wide and chip frozen halfway to her mouth. When he speaks, the words unspool in a slow, careful line, his ease with them equal to hers with guns. "You asked why I talked to you. Why I didn't… hurt you. In the diner. You were… nice to me. You are. You…" He drops his gaze to the table and expels a short breath. His eyes fix upon the apple. The focus calms him and he continues, his voice soft, "You talk to me. You let me talk."

Darcy lowers the chip. She should say something, she _knows_ she should say something, again she should say something, this more than he's ever said to her at one time, perhaps more than he's said to anybody, for years or for decades, but all she can do is stare. In the silence, Bucky shifts. His body tenses. He tilts his head and peers at her from the corners of his eyes, and it's the look more than anything, Bucky hunched and hesitant, that shoves her from her stupor.

"I… Sorry. I just…" She shakes her head, a wry smile tugging at her lips. "You should record this. For posterity. You've just done what no other person has been able to do. Like, ever."

"What?"

"Shut me up."

Bucky straightens, a frown again creasing his brow. "I didn't—"

Darcy leans forward, reaching out with her hand to ease his concern. "I know you didn't. I know. Believe me, it's not a bad thing. In fact…"

"What?"

She shrugs and looks away, down at the chips, at the rest of the food assembled before them. A paltry meal, barely sufficient for one let alone two and let alone one of the two being a genuine super soldier. But Bucky didn't complain. He ate the chips and tried on the shirts, and, when they were too small, he didn't criticize her for messing up by buying the wrong size. Her throat clamps down at the thought, but Darcy pushes past it, drawing in a deep breath, needing to return to him the same honesty that he showed to her.

"I'm not smart. I mean, I am. But not like Jane or Erik. Have I mentioned him? He's kind of like Jane's mentor. And the two of them, they saved the world last year. With science. And Thor… Well, he's Thor. But I'm just… I'm just me. An intern. I mean, I haven't even finished college yet. Most of the time it doesn't bother me because they need me. Jane can get so caught up in theory sometimes that she forgets the real world exists. And Thor's not from here, so he needs someone to explain how things work on Earth. Like how to drive a car and where to get bags for the vacuum cleaner. But sometimes…" She shakes her head again and looks away. "I don't know. I guess I didn't realize how nice it would be to hear that I haven't fucked everything up."

"You haven't."

Her body warms at the sincerity in his voice. Darcy bites down on her bottom lip but can't stop the smile from coming. She glances at Bucky, finds him facing her, focused entirely on her. The intensity is not unwelcome. "Thanks."

Bucky shrugs, but Darcy sees contentment in the way he relaxes back against the chair, his body a loose curve from head to toe. The diner flashes into her mind then, his stiff, straight posture in the booth, and she realizes in that moment that she has helped him, somehow, despite her panic and her fumbling, despite her wretched attempts to help him remember. His eyes still flit to the window and the gun still rests by his left hand, but a person sits before her now, not a blank cipher of violence. At the thought, her grin widens. She plucks the chip from atop the bag and munches on the end, nearly humming in happiness. Bucky glances at her. His mouth twitches again, nearly unfurling into a smile as she nudges the bag back toward him.

They spend the next ten minutes eating in companionable silence, moving from chips to the apples to a Cliff bar each. Darcy even gets Bucky to try a cookie. His eyes brighten at the first taste, and she watches, her amusement tinged by awe and a touch of horror, as he plows through an entire row in three minutes. She understands now his love for pancakes, the man possessing an undeniable sweet tooth. That thought prompts another. Darcy twists the water bottle in her hands again as she contemplates the advantage of posing this question, of opening up another potential can of worms, but this is what she said she would do, she'd help him remember, so she does.

"Can I ask you something?"

She sees a smile tug again at his mouth. "You ask a lot of questions."

"True. But this is me being restrained. Normally, I'm a hell of a lot nosier."

"I wouldn't have guessed."

For that, Darcy gives him a look. At the look, his smirk becomes a grin, and with the grin, the present becomes the past, the man before her melding into the pictures that she studied and the recordings that she watched and the movie of his life that swept the Oscars fifteen years past. Darcy feels her jaw drop at the sight of undiluted Bucky Barnes. She snaps it shut, leaning forward for another Cliff bar to try to conceal her reaction, the flash of heat across her face and the catch of breath in her lungs.

"Keep it up, Sergeant Sass, and I'll eat the rest of your cookies."

She opens the bar, takes a quick bite. Bucky says nothing in response. Darcy uses the silence to collect herself, to let her body cool and her thoughts still. She chews and swallows and only turns back to Bucky when she's certain that she can look at him, not gawk at him. When she does, she finds that he stares at her, his grin gone and his eyes wide.

"Bucky?"

He tenses.

Darcy lowers the bar, a frown pulling at her mouth. "Are you okay?"

Bucky looks away. His gaze flits from the cookies to the chips to the Cliff bars to her, and the diner flashes into her mind, her first sight of him sizing up the domestic array on the table before him. She reaches for a tissue and wipes the sticky residue off her fingers, trying to adjust to this hairpin turn, to determine what induced the regression. Before she can, he speaks.

"We should leave."

Her eyes snap to his face. "What?"

Bucky straightens. His left hand inches toward his gun.

"Bucky—"

His jaw clenches and he closes his eyes.

An idea stumbles into view. "Is it the name?" she asks. "Because I can call you something else. Whatever makes you comfortable."

She receives no response.

Darcy looks away. She pokes at the half-eaten bar, unsure how to proceed, whether to encourage him to talk or to respect his desire for silence. Concern winds through her stomach, twisting her guts. She peers at Bucky again from the corners of her eyes. He sits still as stone, his hands fisted before him. Her eyes drift from the gun to the food to glimmer of light beyond the window, attempting again to understand the source of his discomfort. Comprehension fails to dawn, but inspiration strikes as she glances at him again. Darcy reaches for her water bottle. She takes a quick sip, steeling for potential disaster, but also, she hopes, for success.

"Okay, so you know how I said we were kind of disasters with the talking? No gold stars for us. But then you said you _liked_ it when I talked to you and especially how I let you talk. Which isn't exactly true. I don't _let _you talk. I talk to you and you talk back because that's how conversations go. Even really awkward ones. Like this one. Anyway, what I'm saying is, I'd like for you to talk to me. I mean, if you want to. I'm not ordering you to. Like, at all. I'm _asking _you to. Because we were bonding and snarking, and I thought everything was going dandy, but then you stop and clam up and I don't know why. And I want to know why. If you want me to know. Because, you know, again, I want to help, if I can. So… talking?"

She looks at him, expectant, before looking away, expectance pressure and Darcy not wanting to pressure him, but then she looks back, needing to know. Bucky stares at the table. His hands unfurl, slowly, opened through sheer force of will. He inhales, prepping himself, as though for a fight, and she realizes that it is, for him it is, a fight against himself and the blankness that resides inside him, a fight against Hydra and the abuse they subjected him to for dozens of years. She may struggled to find words sometimes, but she's never in her life questioned her ability or her right to speak. For a second, the enormity of his struggle again overwhelms her, but she finds herself mirroring him, forcing breath into her lungs, forcing her body to relax.

Bucky closes his eyes. He grimaces, opens his eyes, bares his teeth, then mutters something in Russian before shoving the words out in an awkward, stilted lump. "I don't— I don't know why. I was… afraid. I thought… I think— When I remembered before… I think they… hurt me. So I would stop."

He looks at Darcy then, his look the look of the diner, a supplication for guidance, for assurance. Darcy swallows down her bile and tries to shove her rage down with it, but it remains, hot beneath her skin. "It makes sense," she says, pushing at her damp hair. "How else were they going to get you to do what they wanted?"

He nods, but the acceptance of his explanation does little to dull the pain that flashes across his face. Bucky ducks his head; he stares again at the table. Darcy lets him process, reaching for her bottle of water. As she takes a drink, she sees him lift the apple. He sets it back down again then grasps his bottle of water. But he doesn't open it. He just stares at the label, at the water inside. Darcy is about to ask, absurdly, if he needs help opening it, when he speaks again.

"What was your question?"

"Oh. I, uh, I just wanted to know why Brooklyn. If you remembered something about it."

He shakes his head. "Read about it in the museum."

Darcy nods, aware of the revival exhibit at the Smithsonian. She had wanted to swing by after her interview with S.H.I.E.L.D., take a few selfies with Exhibit Steve to send to the real deal, but the chaos in D.C. had put the shish to that kebob. Not that she minds, the _other _real deal sitting right before her. She had hoped he had remembered something about Brooklyn though. If he had, they would have some plan in place other than just casually strolling into the borough all Butch Bucky and the Lewis Kid. A plan significantly limited the possibilities for chaos and destruction.

"Can I ask a question?"

Her eyes snap toward him, his question about questions jerking her from her contemplations. Bucky peers at her sidelong, his brow creased. Darcy summons a smile, nods her permission. He swallows. His hand tightens on the bottle, but he expels a slow breath and relaxes his grip. Darcy waits, again trying not to stare but also not to not stare.

"You know him."

The intonation recalls for Darcy the bathroom, Bucky's statement then about Steve. He must refer to him here too. "Kind of," she says with a shrug. "He visited Thor for, like, a week back in February."

Bucky says nothing. His thumb worries the edge of the label on the bottle. Questions bubble and press against Darcy's brain, dozens of them, but she squashes them down, waiting for him to speak. His eyes flit to her and then away. He shifts in place, clears his throat and then continues on.

"Tell me. About him."

"Like what? History stuff?"

He shakes his head. "I know history. It's not… him."

She understands his frustration, the essence of a person hard to capture in an exhibit, even one as grand as those at the Smithsonian. She doubts Hydra told Bucky more than the Captain basics, about his strength and speed and fighting skills, but little about the person, about the man behind the shield. Licking her lips, Darcy recalls his visit to London, the time that he spent with her and Thor, Erik, and Jane. She sifts through the moments, the dinners and sightseeing, the sparring and the hushed conversation about grief that Darcy had accidentally walked in on between him and Thor. As she places her water back upon the table, a picture begins to emerge.

"He's funnier than I thought he would be. Which is weird because that's what people have said about him, you know, in interviews and stuff. Those that knew him. The Commandos. Agent Carter. But most of the time he's portrayed as this no-nonsense dude. A real stick-in-the-mud. But he isn't." She pauses, her face creasing into a soft smile. "He cares, too. And not in the fake way that most people care about other people's problems. He was only there for a week, but he listened to each of us. I mean, even to me, and all I was dealing with was my asshole boyfriend breaking up with me. Not anything close to Erik or Thor and their angst about Loki."

"Loki?"

"Thor's brother. He tried to take over the world a couple years back. He kind of drove Erik crazy in the process." Darcy pauses again. She glances at Bucky. He watches her, withdrawn into himself and peering out, once more wary, but not of her, she thinks. Of her truth. Darcy reaches for her water and takes a drink. She contemplates stopping then, but decides to continue on, to again say the thing she probably shouldn't say. But he'd wanted to know.

"Loki died last year. Thor… He didn't deal with it very well. He'd asked Loki to come with him, to help him with his mission to save the world. Loki died right in front of him." She pauses and meets his eyes. "Steve sympathized."

At that, Bucky looks away. His hand tightens around the water bottle. Darcy waits, trying again to let him process the revelations, the shading to the outline that he'd already acquired. He sits still as stone, but she sees thoughts swirling in the slow slide of his eyes from the bottle to the gun. He stares at it a moment before dropping his gaze.

"I shot him."

Darcy freezes, caught off guard by the revelation and the speed with which he delivered it.

"Three times."

He shifts in the chair. His eyes dart to her. Darcy nods, the right words to say dangling beyond her reach. Whatever Bucky sees in her face though must be okay for he continues on. Darcy listens, frozen, to the quiet revelation. "He saved me. He was my mission, but he saved me. After I shot him." Bucky leans toward her now, anguish clear in his eyes. "Why?"

She flounders for a moment, thrown by the intensity of his need. Then the right response surfaces and she says to him, "Because you're his friend."

Bucky shakes his head. "I don't know him."

"But he knows you."

He shakes his head again, presses his mouth into a thin line.

"What?"

"I don't— I'm not…"

"Bucky—"

"Him." He swallows and looks her right in the eye. "I'm not him."

Darcy eyes him, waiting for the punch line, but one doesn't come. She plucks another chip from the bag, needing fortification to wade into this minefield. After the first bite, she dives in. "Why not?"

Bucky eyes her now, and she thinks that he, as she had moments before, waits for the punch line. When it doesn't come, though, he doesn't restrain himself in the graceful way that she had. Instead Bucky sighs, loudly, conveying in crystal-clear tones his frustration with her. Darcy just arches a brow at him and takes another bite from the chip. At her look, he deflates, contrition flashing in his eyes. He lifts his right hand and rubs at the back of his neck as he says, his voice soft, "You said that I wasn't."

Darcy frowns at that. "What? No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did. In the bathroom."

"What? No— Oh." She looks at him, remembering her comment. The urge to sigh wells within her now, but she restrains it by the slimmest of margins. "It was hyperbole, dude. Exaggeration, like eighty-five percent of what comes out of my mouth. It wasn't mean to be an absolute declaration of self."

Bucky shakes his head. At Darcy's surprised blink, he lifts his chin, steeling himself for the rest of her reaction, but holding firm. The thought, his instinctive reaction to contradiction, makes her want to cry. Keeping her reaction as muted as possible, she reaches for another chip and takes a bite. "Why not?"

"Memory's important."

"It is. But it's not everything."

"Yes, it is."

The quiet contradiction distresses her. To him, of course memory would be everything, Bucky remembering nothing, likely feeling like nothing, an empty cup washed clean of all that it held. Darcy wants to shove cookies at him and blankets too, to give him a hug and a puppy to hold, but she does neither. Instead, she shakes her head, this line of thought slippery, too dangerous to let him pursue.

"It isn't," she says. "It can't be. You're here. You're sitting right in front of me, and you're not… you're not _nothing_. You're someone. You're you."

"But not him."

"So who are you then if you're not Bucky?"

Some of the irritation fades from his face. Bucky shrugs and looks away, and Darcy waits, but he gives no other response. Leaning forward, she catches his eye again and says, her tone light and gentle, "If you don't know who you are, how can you say you're not Bucky?"

Bucky glares at her for that, for pushing where he does not want to be pushed, but Darcy holds firm. Eventually, he relents. "They said… The museum—" He huffs out a sigh, frustrated with himself, with her too, she knows, but as Darcy straightens, he persists, and his persistence seals her belief in him being one of the bravest people she's ever known. "They said he was… a hero. That he died a hero."

"Yeah. And?"

He gives her another look. "I'm not."

"How do you know? You just said you don't know who you are."

Bucky grits his teeth. "I heard your friend. She said I was dangerous. She told you to get away from me. I'm not… I'm not— I read about Hydra. At the museum. I know who they were."

"So? You're not them."

"I am. They—"

She shakes her head.

Bucky looks at her, his mouth a flat line. "How do you know? You don't know me."

"And you don't know me. Yet when I walked up to you in that diner, you know what you _didn't_ do? You didn't stab me. Or shoot me. You talked to me. And we know that's not what Hydra would have done because we _know _what Hydra would have done because they did it. They stabbed you and they shot at me and they killed every single person in that diner. So you might feel like you're Hydra because they've probably done their best to make you feel like you are, but you're _not_. You're not. You don't have to be Bucky if you don't want to be. But don't you think for a goddamned second that you're one of them."

Bucky closes his eyes. He tilts his head away from her. Darcy sees his chest hitch. He tries to breathe, but the sob seizes hold of him, the dam finally bursting. She reaches out then, lays her hand on his wrist, strokes her thumb against the taut line of muscles and tendons in his arm. A lump forms in her throat, but she swallows it down. She can't break, not when he needs to, and he needs to so he can try to start, somehow, to deal with all that has happened to him. Her eyes drift across his chest again, from the bruises to the bandage to scars surrounding his metal arm. A shadow to those he bears inside, but as with the physical, they too would heal. With time. And with help. And she will help him.

"How long has it been since you've slept?" she asks softly.

Bucky shudders, his body still held by his grief. Ducking his head, he glances past her to the digital clock. "Twenty-nine hours."

"Jesus Christ. You need to sleep. Now."

He pulls away from her, shaking his head.

"Why not?"

His eyes dart to the window and his reason clarifies.

"I know it's not safe," she says. "But you lost a lot of blood and you've had a shit day and you need to rest. I can watch for a while. Trust me. There are few things I do better than sit on my ass and watch things."

Bucky relaxes a fraction. He swipes his right hand across his cheeks, smearing the tears down into his beard. Then he tenses again as his eyes fall onto the bed. "I don't… sleep well."

Of course he wouldn't. Why would he? Darcy tries to banish the thought, what his brain must dredge up for his nightmares, the tortures from Hydra, his life as an assassin. Shunting aside her need to rage, she gives a careless shrug and says, "If you don't, you don't. Then you can watch and I'll sleep or we'll both watch or we can do what all people with functioning internet do when they can't sleep. Fall into the black hole that is cute puppy videos on Youtube."

Bucky watches the bed a moment longer and then gives a stiff nod. He shoves his gun to the edge of the table. Darcy moves to stand, scooting to the end of the bed. Bucky rises from the chair and takes her place. As she eases around the table and claims his chair, he lays down backwards, his feet on the pillows. She opens her mouth to explain before understanding clicks, his gun within reach in this position.

"Do you want a blanket?" she asks as she pushes his water bottle close to his gun.

Bucky shakes his head. He lies flat on his back, his arms straight out by his sides. But he doesn't close his eyes. He just stares at the ceiling, his jaw clenched so hard she's afraid he'll crack a tooth if he continues.

"Do you want me to turn off the light?"

Again, he shakes his head.

Darcy watches him from the corners of her eyes. A minute passes and then another, but he doesn't move, his body remains tense, his arms straight, his eyes open. Darcy reaches out, nearly clasping his hand with her own, but she reconsiders the gesture, not wanting to push the contact between them. She drops her hand to the bed and checks the parking lot instead, seeing nothing as she contemplates what to say and what to do. Whatever disturbed her sleep in the past paled in comparison to the nightmare that had befallen him. She doesn't think that counting backwards from 300 by 3s or reciting _Anchorman _lines in his head would work to distract him. Darcy considers downloading a white noise app to her iPad to give him something to focus on, something innocuous, when she feels his fingers brush against her hand. They both freeze, even Bucky, though he initiated the contact. The desire for contact is likely as surprising for him as it is for her. Swallowing down her shock, Darcy twists her arm, opening her hand to his. She keeps her eyes glued to the window. After a moment, Bucky clasps her hand in the same light grip that he used for their handshake. Darcy sits still and tries to breathe, she tries to look normal, to be normal, though her head spins. She contemplates looking at him, but she continues to resist, for her more than him, too many thoughts racing through her brain about the significance of the gesture and her feelings concerning it and her thoughts concerning him and their journey the next day and when it would end and where it would end and how it would end.

The night passes slow beneath a hazy yellow light when she finally turns to find Bucky with his eyes closed, his body again loose, and his gun gripped in his left hand.


	6. Chapter 6

That Which You Seek

Part Six

By: Wynn

Darcy anticipated thrashing and screaming and possibly unintended bodily harm when Bucky woke from his nightmare, but when he wakes fifty-six minutes after he fell asleep, he wakes pale and shaking but with the rest of his trauma contained within. His metal hand tightens on his gun, but he doesn't raise it or shoot it. He just stares at the ceiling, his face ashen. His other hand trembles in hers. Darcy gives it a gentle squeeze, trying to comfort him, but at the touch, wide eyes dart to her. For a moment, she wonders if he's forgotten who she is again, but a spark of recognition appears and Bucky releases a slow breath.

"Are you okay?" she asks, twisting around in the chair toward him.

Bucky pulls his hand from hers and wipes his palm against his forehead, dotted now with sweat. Swallowing, he shakes his head.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Rather than answer, he turns and rolls off the bed. Darcy watches as he heads to the bathroom. His step is steady, but she sees agitation in the way that the plates shift on his metal arm, in the ripple of muscles across his back, in the hard hold he has on his gun. The door to the bathroom closes behind him with a soft click. Darcy closes her eyes at the sound, trying not to interpret it as symbolic, but her heart drops two minutes later when the door opens again and Bucky walks out, his gun still in his hand and his armor now on.

"I'll take watch," he says, avoiding her gaze.

Darcy nods, abandoning any notion of conversation. What could she say? Nothing, if his actions were any indication. Perhaps she could try later, after he had time to unwind, after the dream had faded and his security returned. She eases from the chair, sliding onto the bed as Bucky rounds the table. He places his gun beside the cookies as he sits and then he leans over and lifts one of the rifles. Darcy tries not to stare as he dismantles it, as he peers inside and presumably checks for functionality, but she does, the urge to talk still pushing at her brain. Bucky endures her gaze for a minute before his hands still and he says, again without looking at her, "You should sleep."

The declaration sounds like the click of the bathroom door, like the shower curtain ripped across the metal rod, like the dismissal that it is. Darcy considers fighting it, considers forcing him to talk. She knows Steve would, Thor probably would too, those two boundless fonts of patience, but exhaustion pulls hard at her and Darcy gives in. Besides, after everything they endured today, the death and the tears and the shared revelations, his rejection stings.

Twisting around, Darcy crawls up the bed to the pillows and then down beneath the blankets. As she settles under the stiff cotton, her eyes fall onto the lit lamp. Her hand is halfway to the switch before she remembers Bucky's request for it to stay on. She glances back at him, finds him still focused on the weaponry arrayed on the table. "Do you want the light on?"

"No."

The curt response makes her sigh. Darcy switches off the lamp and lays her head onto the pillow. She stares at the lamp and tries to sleep. When that fails, she stares at the generic landscape on the wall to the bathroom and then at the ancient television and then at sink and the mirror beyond it that reflects the soft light peeking in from the parking lot. She slows her breathing and tries to relax because she needed sleep, Bucky wasn't wrong about that though she knows his suggestion derived less from concern about her and more from evading any concern she had about him. But relaxation doesn't come, Darcy too aware of the man behind her, though he barely makes a sound. She shifts in bed, closes her eyes, opens them again, then huffs out another soft sigh. The memory of his hand in hers flashes into her mind. Darcy tenses against it, irritation at him and his rejection flaring within her again, followed quickly by guilt because Bucky didn't _have_ to talk to her if he didn't want to, she'd been the one to tell him that earlier that evening after all, and besides she probably didn't _want_ to hear what he had to say, the dreams of a former sniper-turned-brainwashed assassin unlikely to be pleasant. But the hurt persists, an unintended echo of a familiar refrain. Darcy the bothersome. Darcy the useless.

She sits, so suddenly that she makes Bucky start. Pushing off the blankets, she stands and walks across to the room to her bag, where she digs for her iPod. Darcy unwinds the headphones, puts them in, and turns on the Pod, aware, again, of Bucky and his gaze upon her. She squints at the glow of the screen and scrolls through her playlists as she makes her way back to the bed. His head turns as he tracks her progress. She considers ignoring him as he rebuffed her, but then she remembers that she's supposed to be the emotionally mature one of the two, the helper of remembrance and the unintended teacher of healthy communication. Glancing at him, she lifts her iPod and says, "Can't sleep. Music helps."

It didn't have to be _extensive _communication.

Bucky nods, but she sees the furrow between his brows. Darcy ignores it. Let him figure out whatever puzzled him, whether it was the simple concept of letting music lull one to sleep or the more complicated notion of Darcy having her own demons that prevented her from resting. Climbing into bed, she settles on a playlist. The soft sounds of _Ocean Songs _begin to wash over her as she closes her eyes. She focuses on the music, on the languid ting of the cymbals and the slow rumble of the bass and not on the man behind her or the feel of his eyes upon her or the touch of his hand on hers or on the strange day already behind them or the long day stretching before. Darcy focuses on the music, and, within fifteen minutes, she's asleep.

* * *

Within three hours, she's awake, thrashing as Bucky hadn't thrashed, her fingers tangling in her headphones as she claws at the hands that no longer squeeze her throat. The cords tighten around her neck as she moves. Darcy pulls at them, only to tighten their grip. She gasps, choking, still caught in the dream, and then she's free, the pressure loosening and air rushing into her lungs.

In the diner, the woman hadn't choked her. She'd just tackled Darcy and shoved her gun in her face. Leave it to her subconscious to add a delightful new wrinkle to an already delightful memory. Shivering, Darcy opens her eyes. Bucky crouches above her, his knife in his hand. A sliver of fear darts through her before the pieces come together, her headphones around her neck and the sudden freedom. Lifting up her hand, she sees the severed ends of the white cords, the other ends held loosely between Bucky's fingers.

"Thanks," she says, the word a croaking groan.

Bucky nods. He eases off the bed until he's standing by her feet. Darcy sits as he sheathes his knife. She reaches for her water bottle and downs the lot, her breath coming in staggered gasps between each swallow, in time to the ragged beat of her heart. She waits for Bucky to return to the chair, to resume his watch, but he doesn't, hovering instead by the bed, his brow again furrowed. Or maybe it never un-furrowed. Maybe his face, as her grandfather always said could happen, really did get stuck that way after being left too long in brood mode. His concern bites at her though, reigniting her irritation at his prior dismissal.

"I'm fine," she says, rubbing a hand across her throat. "Just a nightmare."

Bucky nods again but he doesn't say anything. Darcy places the empty bottle on the table beside the bed then she collects her useless iPod and places it by the bottle too. She avoids his gaze and crawls once more beneath the blankets. They remain in place, Darcy flat on her back and her eyes on the ceiling, Bucky by the bed and his eyes on her, for nearly a minute before she hears him sigh. He shifts in place. He lifts his hand and actually pinches the bridge of his nose. She nearly cracks then, preparing to lift her head to say something, but then he lowers his arm and stutters out his own stilted brand of word vomit.

"Do you— If you… We could… talk."

Darcy pushes to her elbows and quirks a brow at him. "_Now _you want to talk? When it's my brain trauma under discussion?"

He shrugs. "I don't. You might."

The explanation renders her silent, the gesture, and the concern beneath it, unexpected. Though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Her eyes flit to the bathroom, to his prior declaration of her mattering. She'd thought that he said it because she was helping him, because she was a part of the mission too. But maybe not. Maybe it's just her. Maybe she matters. To him. The thought makes her flush. Darcy's glad for the darkness, though if Bucky sees as well as he hears he can probably see her reaction. She bites her lip and looks away, then realizes she's been silent for too long and says, trying not to stammer, "Thanks. I would. Normally. But not… Not now. I just— I want to forget."

He nods again, as though he understands, and she knows that he does, given his difficult return to consciousness. Silence descends them. Neither of them moves. Darcy barely breathes. She peers at Bucky from the corners of her eyes. He stares down at the floor, his jaw tight. She tilts her head a little more toward him. The movement catches his eye and he turns abruptly for the chair. Darcy sits and reaches out for him. "Wait!"

He does, Bucky a dark shadow at the end of the bed. She finds her eyes drawn to his metal arm, to the gleam of light high on his shoulder by the star. Licking her lips, the irony of her request not lost upon her, she says, "Do you want to watch YouTube videos with me? Something nice. Like puppies. Or birds. Something to distract."

He looks at the window.

Darcy lowers her arm. "Sorry. I know it's not—"

"Okay."

Her eyes dart to his. "Really?"

He nods.

Darcy doesn't bother to hide the smile that blooms across her face. "Awesome." Leaning over, she turns on the light before kicking off the blankets to slide out of bed. She grabs the pillows from the other bed, tosses them onto hers, his, theirs, she supposes, then she makes her way back to her bag to unearth her tablet. This would be hell on her data plan, but better hell on her data plan than hell in her brain. She needed the distraction and he likely did too, or if not distraction then at least something nice to nice, something more than violence and pain.

Flipping open the cover, she turns the tablet on. Bucky still stands by the end of the bed, watching her, one corner of his mouth twitching in amusement. It may or may not be fond. She returns to the bed, pointing with her chin at the right side. "Take a pillow, Mr. Barnes, and let me lead you down the rabbit hole."

* * *

Side by side, they watch puppy videos and then kitten videos. Bucky endures those, his expression mild, more interested, she thinks, in her reaction to the videos than the videos themselves. She sees his eyes stray to the window, to the guns laid out on the table and the chair pulled close, but then she clicks on one of her favorites, a BBC video about birds of paradise, and this finally captures his attention. She watches him watch the birds trill and caw and puff out their tiny chests in their bizarre attempts to win a mate. He tilts his head as one of the birds straightens his bower, he smiles at the little dancing bird shaped like a bell, and then he actually laughs when the Superb bird of paradise spins around before the female, an inky black oval dotted with two sky blue eyes and a cummerbund strip of the same color. It's a reaction she wants to see again.

Closing down YouTube, Darcy opens Netflix and pulls up the BBC documentary _The Life of Birds_. They settle in to watch, or she settles in, slouching down into the pillows, propping the tablet on her bent legs. Bucky sits as straight as he did in the chair, his legs extended before him, his hands by his sides, but as one episode passes to the next, his posture softens, he turns less and less to the window, and the smile, so hesitant at first and stiff with disuse, appears more and more often. The sight makes her want to laugh and cry and hide out here for a month, avoiding the world outside and just letting the past be the past and the future be the future and for the two of them to exist, here, now, in the present.

She falls asleep again sometime between the third and fourth episode. Sunlight illuminates the room when she wakes, her neck stiff and her face planted against Bucky's chest. She feels a modicum of embarrassment at having so thoroughly invaded his personal space, embarrassment that grows when, upon easing back, she discovers that she also drooled on his armor. Grimacing, she lifts a hand and pats at the spot with the sleeve of her sweater. This draws his attention from the window, and he peers down at her with a raised brow.

"Sorry for the drool, dude."

Bucky shrugs as she eases back. "I bled in your backseat."

"True. I guess that makes us friends now, mutually exchanging fluids and all."

Bucky blinks at that, thrown by her suggestion of friendship. He looks away, over to the tablet, then back to her, his mouth open. Darcy swallows and gives her face the same treatment as his armor. She turns too and contemplates her options, whether she should shift the conversation to the day ahead and just ignore the idea that so thoroughly confounded him, or if she should summon some sass and try to restore his equilibrium with a joke about birds or drool or something innocuous. He spares her the choice by speaking first.

"I don't… I'm not…"

Darcy glances back at him, finds him frowning at her, anger in his eyes again. Anger at her. She bristles at the sight. "What?"

He bristles at her bristling. "A friend."

"Uh, yeah, you are. We crossed that line in hour two of our epic bird watching marathon."

Bucky shakes his head, his face set and his jaw tilted straight to stubborn. Darcy restrains her sigh, fully aware of the irony of them arguing with each other about being friends. She shifts on the bed until she faces him and then says, "Why not? I would make the _best_ friend. Okay, yes, there's some drool involved and there may also be some personal space issues, but—"

"That's not—" Bucky stops and closes his eyes. He draws in a frustrated breath and tries again. "Your nightmare. It was because of me. The diner. I—" He opens his eyes and looks at her. Guilt shines clear in the blue. "You're here because of—"

Darcy holds up a hand and cuts him off. "No. Let's just stop the guilt train right here. I'm here because of _me_. _I_ talked to you in the diner. _I_ drove back for you. Those were my choices. No one is making me doing any of this, least of all you. I'm helping you because I want to."

Bucky stares at her a long moment. His eyes slide past her to the shirts, to the food, to the tablet by his guns on the chair. He frowns again, but not in anger this time. In contemplation. "Because we're friends."

She nods, some of her irritation diminishing.

Bucky peers at his hand, prone on the bed beside her leg. Some emotion passes across his face that she can't determine and then he says, so quiet she almost can't hear, "To the end of the line."

"Yes."

His eyes fly up to hers, perhaps at her agreement, or maybe at her lack of hesitation, but she already knew it last night when he broke down and reached for her hand. She understands New Mexico a little better now, the bond that had formed between Jane and Thor. This feels like what Thor described when he told them of the battle in New York too and the trust that had so quickly developed between him and the team. Bucky looks away, but she sees the gleam of tears in his eyes. He blinks twice, works his jaw around, and pulls in another breath.

"Okay," he says, looking back at her.

Her brows draw together. "Okay what?"

"Friends," he clarifies. "We can be that."

Darcy grins. "Sweet." She leans forward and punches him lightly on the shoulder, the universal gesture of bro solidarity. Bucky endures the gesture as he endured the puppy videos. "You won't regret it." She pauses then as her eyes drop to the drying drool stain. "Well, maybe—"

"I won't."

The avowal makes her blush. She thinks about telling Bucky to record this too, blushing like silence for her, an unaccustomed event, particularly with men. But not, it seems, with Bucky. He speaks without pretense, as does she, but he speaks with a sincerity that slips past her quips and sass and evokes genuine emotion. Darcy squirms in place, her grin slipping to something smaller, something softer. She peers at Bucky from the corners of her eyes and finds him looking at her for the first time as a man, not as a weapon or a blank slate seeking comfort or a light in the darkness. Her flush intensifies and she inches off the bed, trying not to stumble.

"Good," she says. "Good. That's good. That's— Pancakes? How about pancakes?"

His eyes turn sly. "We don't have any."

The humor grounds her. She gives him a look for it. Bucky meets the look with a smirk, giving her another glimpse of undiluted Bucky Barnes. Before she can retort, though, he's up and off the bed in a move so fast and sleek that her brain can barely process. But she does. Because she has to, Bucky on _her _side of the bed and standing so close that he must have taken her quip about personal space to be a literal requirement of their friendship. "I know," he says, staring down at her, the smirk still in place and his eyes bright in the sunlight. "Keep with the sass, and you'll eat all my cookies."

Darcy licks her lips and tries to stay sane. "Damn skippy."

Grinning now, he moves past her for the bathroom. "Be ready in ten," he says and there's no symbolism in the click of the lock as he closes the bathroom door this time around. Alone, Darcy closes her eyes and tugs on her sweater, seeking oxygen, seeking sanity still, the last look on his face burned into her brain.

* * *

She half expects chaos to greet them as they leave the motel, huge fireballs of the Michael Bay variety and more bad B-movie villains. Bucky inches out of the room, a gun in his right hand and his left held out toward her, keeping her back, keeping her safe. She makes no complaint, as much a realist as a feminist. Best to let the super assassin soldier with the body armor, guns, and mad fighting skills get the lay of the land first.

They find nothing but silence and sunshine outside the room though. Darcy drapes two towels over the bloodstains in the backseat. Bucky joins her in the front, placing the guns not already strapped to his body on the floor by his feet. They say nothing as the pull out of the parking lot, nothing as they drive north, nothing as Darcy stops for gas and Bucky finally concedes to the need for camouflage and dons the hoodie over his armor. He focuses on the world beyond the cabin of the car, his eyes on an endless loop from side mirror to windshield to rearview mirror to side mirror, slipping seamlessly from Bucky to soldier. She can barely keep her focus on the road though, strung out from too little sleep and too many feelings, ninety percent concerning the man beside her.

"Are you okay?"

Darcy starts at his quiet question. She sees him from the corners of her eyes, his head tilted toward her. "What?" she asks, wincing at the elevated pitch. "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm—"

"Tapping."

Darcy glances at her hands; her thumbs currently tap a random melody of confusion and stress on the steering wheel. Abruptly, she stops, gripping the wheel tight. "Sorry. I, uh, usually drive with music."

"Play some."

Darcy finally looks at him. His gaze is clear, not the blank clarity of the diner, the soldier without substance, but of a man momentarily free from the torments that haunt him. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I don't remember the last time I heard it." He drifts off for a moment before his lips twist into a wry grin. "At least not in a cat video."

"Well, okay then."

Releasing one hand from the steering wheel, Darcy digs into her bag for her iPod. Bucky helps her plug it into the dash of the Prius. She searches through her playlists, settling, after a moment, on her mellow mix. The last thing Bucky needed was Kurt Cobain or Chris Cornell wailing in his ears about heart-shaped boxes and black hole suns, though she thinks in the future he'd appreciate grunge, his old-timey roots notwithstanding. Instead, a Dusty Springfield song drifts over the speakers. They listen in silence, Bucky as intent upon the song as he had been on the mirrors. The music relaxes Darcy, though the lyrics don't, Dusty imploring her man to give her some of his lovin'. They don't seem to faze Bucky, for which she is eternally grateful. Damien Rice follows Dusty and then Billie Holiday follows Damien, and it's with Billie that Bucky finally speaks.

"Who… is this?"

The hitch in his voice makes her tense. Glancing over, Darcy sees his hands fisted in his lap and his eyes closed tight. If she weren't driving, she'd smack herself on the head for playing a song he might know, something that might trigger memories, possibly bad as well as good. Leaning over, Darcy is about to switch tracks to something else when a flash in the rearview captures her attention. Looking up, Darcy finds an SUV approaching fast. She gasps at the sight. Bucky moves beside her, but not to spring into action. Instead, he folds in upon himself further, shaking now. Cursing softly, Darcy yanks the iPod from the stereo console and presses down on the accelerator, but at the increase of speed, lights flash behind her. Frowning, she peeks again at the rearview mirror. Despite her speed, the SUV has drawn closer, and she now sees a shock of blond and silver, Thor in the passenger seat, hanging half out the window and waving at her.

Relief rushes through her, bringing a smile to her face. She eases her foot down onto the brake and signal her intent to pull off the road. As the SUV mirrors her actions, she says to Bucky, "Company's here."

The change in momentum more than her comment pulls Bucky from himself. He looks up at her, tears in his eyes and a question on his lips, but before he can speak, the shock of gravel beneath the tires as she directs the car off the road yanks him straight. His gaze darts to the rearview mirror. He tenses at the sight of the SUV and mutters something in Russian.

"No," she says, pressing harder on the brake to bring the car to a stop.

Bucky twists in his seat, his back to her, his eyes on the side mirror. He sheds his hoodie and then reaches for a gun.

"No," she says again, reaching for him.

At the touch of her hand on his metal arm, Bucky moves. He shoves her back so hard that her head slams against the window. Pain bursts bright in her head and her shoulder, her collarbone breaking beneath the force of his arm. Through her tears, she sees Bucky lift the gun. He brings it around, and for half a heartbeat, she thinks that she's dead, Bucky gone, again the shell from the diner, his face wet from tears but his eyes empty. Then the gun moves past her, it aims at the rear windshield, at the SUV beyond. She cries out at the increased pressure on her shoulder, Bucky trying to push her down. He pauses at the cry, and his eyes shift to her. Darcy sees something in them, she sees _him_, but then the passenger door is wrenched from the car followed a second later by Bucky, who's pulled off her and thrown back into the trees by Thor.

"No," she says again, the word a strangled mess of pain and panic.

Either Thor ignores her or he doesn't hear for he turns from the car to walk into the trees. As he does, Darcy spots Mew-Mew in his hand. She fumbles for her seatbelt with one hand and for the door with the other. The world spins slowly around her, her head aching. She calls again for Thor, but he continues on. She finally pops open the door, but the seatbelt stays, Darcy's hand slipping over the smooth metal. She thinks she hears her name, but she ignores it and peers down at the seatbelt, trying to focus. Another flare of pain surges through her as she finally shoves the belt open with her right hand and scrambles from the car.

As she rounds the front, she hears her name again, Jane calling for her from near the SUV. Darcy ignores her, stumbling down the hill after Thor. She can't find the passenger door, but her breath catches again as she sees Bucky crouched before a broken tree, a gun in his hand and pointed at Thor. She lifts her right arm, reaching out for them as she tries to call out, but the word dies in her throat as pain explodes again from her shoulder. She falters and drops to a knee and this finally gains their attention.

"Darcy," Thor says, his eyes still on Bucky. "Return to the road. Jane—"

"No."

She eases to her feet then, clenching her jaw. Bucky looks at her as she moves forward. His eyes widen as she steps between them.

Jane gasps too at her placement. "Darcy, no—"

Darcy ignores her and turns to face Thor. He wears his chest armor and boots with blue jeans, his hair restrained by two thin braids curving back over his ears. Beyond him, Darcy sees Jane by the SUV, her hands clutched in a tight knot before her. Tony stands beside her, his face pale and his left hand encased in the glove from his suit, the weapon primed and directed at Bucky.

Thor lowers Mew-Mew a fraction as he takes her in. "Darcy, you must—"

"No," she says, looking back at him. "_You _must. You're making it worse."

Thor frowns at her. "He injured you. He—"

"—was trying to help. He thought you were Hydra." Darcy looks past him to Tony. A wave of nausea roils through her, but she bites it back. "Nice car, by the way. Very evil."

Tony grimaces, but he doesn't lower the glove. "So says the intern protecting the Winter Soldier."

"Bucky's not evil."

This pauses Tony. "He might not be evil, but he's not stable, kid."

"So says the PTSD crayon breaker, but you don't see me shoving a gun in your face."

Tony glares at her for that, but Darcy refuses to relent. She turns again to Thor and wills herself to focus. As she does, she discerns hesitation in his eyes and pounces. "I told him that you and Steve were friends and that you would help him, like you helped Erik. Because that's what we do. We help people. Are you going to make me a liar?"

Thor hesitates. He looks past her to Bucky. He stares so long that Darcy feels she'll need to try again, to invoke the ghost of Loki, but whatever Thor sees causes him finally to ease down, to move Mew-Mew behind him and drop from attack stance. Darcy feels her body sway, but she digs in and turns her gaze back to Tony. He doesn't ease down. He stares at Bucky, his face twisted now and ugly with hate. The palm of his glove glows. Darcy shifts to the left, places herself more firmly between him and Bucky.

"Move," Tony says.

Darcy shakes her head.

"You don't know—"

"Neither did he. Whatever he did, he didn't know and it wasn't his choice. It was Hydra's. They're the ones to hate. Not Bucky."

Doubt creeps into the certainty within Tony's eyes, but he doesn't drop his weapon. As the standoff persists, spots flash before Darcy, a coterie of stars that momentarily blind her. But she holds her ground. Or she tries to. She feels herself start to fall but she stops before she hits the ground, Bucky beside her, on her left, his real arm wrapped around her waist. His other hand holds his gun, still raised and pointed now at Tony. The two stare at each other a long moment before Tony shakes his head and finally lowers his hand. Darcy watches him fish a cell phone from his pocket and then she turns to Thor. "Give us a minute. Please."

He nods and moves away, but not without a last measured look at Bucky. Bucky holds his gaze, his face glazed with tears but his stance unyielding.

"I need to sit," Darcy says as Thor makes his way up the embankment.

Bucky helps her down to the ground, his hand on her waist to guide and steady her. He crouches before her, facing her but keeping Thor and Tony in view. Darcy takes a moment to breathe in, closing her eyes as the world spins again around her. She likely has a concussion in addition to the broken collarbone. The thought of a cast or a sling makes her tense. As she does, Bucky's hand tightens on her waist.

"I hurt you."

Darcy opens her eyes, finds Bucky staring at her, his brows drawn together in concern. "A little," she admits. "Not all of us are super dudes."

"I didn't— I wanted—" He drops his gaze. His chest shudders in the effort to breathe.

Darcy reaches out, places her left hand his knee. "Hey, it's okay."

"I'm sorry," he says, looking at her.

Her throat closes at the anguish twisting his face. "I'm not."

Bucky turns away. He pulls his bottom lip between his teeth and bites down so hard she's afraid he'll draw blood, but then the breath leaves his body in a ragged rush and his hand relaxes on her side. "Because it was your choice," he says, meeting her gaze once more.

Darcy nods. In the distance, she sees Jane and Thor, she sees Tony by the back of the SUV still on his phone. All of them watch her and Bucky. She rubs her thumb against his knee, recalling the night before and her desire for reinforcements, her belief that they would help him, better than she could and had. She doubts the latter now, but the former still survives, each of them with something they can give to Bucky, something she doesn't have, something that can help him. She just hopes it's not too late.

"And now you have one too."

Bucky tenses as she looks past him at Jane, Thor, and Tony. "I think they can help," she begins, her voice soft. "Even Tony. He's got access to resources that I don't. And his dad helped make Captain America. Tony might be able to figure out what Hydra has done to you. Maybe even help you remember."

Bucky peers over his shoulder at the others. His gaze lingers on Tony, Bucky looking at him as he looked at the pancakes in what seemed like a lifetime ago to her now. Darcy would laugh, the reaction, she thinks, how most people react to Tony the first time they meet him. But too much rides on the moment, so she says instead, "Steve trusts him. They've fought together before."

Bucky turns back to her. "Do you?"

"Yes."

Despite her endorsement, he hesitates. Darcy leans forward and gives his shoulder another fist bump of bro solidarity. "You trusted me," she says, sending him a crooked grin, "and look at how well that's turned out so far. You've been shot at and stabbed, yelled at and drooled on. You've eaten weird food and watched an ungodly amount of cat videos, and now you've been tossed from a Toyota Prius by an actual alien god. And today is only day two."

He matches her crooked grin with one of his own.

"All it has to be is a car ride," Darcy says. "We need a ride. Thor kind of totaled the Prius. But if you don't want to stay after that, we don't have to. We can call Steve then, if you want, or we can go to Brooklyn on our own."

The expression on his face breaks her heart, both the astonishment and the relief at her stated intent to stay. His hand tightens around her waist again. His palm is warm and steady in a way that surprises her, but she finds herself leaning into the hold, the presence reassuring. Another second passes in which he contemplates then he sucks in a preparatory breath and holsters his gun.

"Okay."

Darcy releases a gasping bubble of a laugh. She sags against his leg and presses her forehead to his knee, her head suddenly too heavy to hold up on her own. "That's good," she says, half hysterical and dazed with pain. "That's great. I'm going to pass out now."

Darcy expects a laugh, but instead, in another move too fast and sleek for her to follow, Bucky swoops in and lifts her up, his right arm around her back and his left beneath her legs. He's careful to avoid jostling her too much. Darcy settles into him, leaning her head against his shoulder. "I'll try not to drool on you this time," she mumbles into his chest.

Now the laugh comes, a short bark that sends a frisson of pleasure through her. They make their way up the embankment, and Darcy starts to laugh as she catches sight of the expressions that greet them, Tony with his eyes wide and his brows lifted so high they nearly disappear into his hairline, Jane gaping at them like a deranged fish, and Thor smiling as bright and as wide as the summer sun.

To Bucky, she says, "Mr. Barnes, I present you with Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man, he of the extremely tall towers and obscene piles of money. Next to him is my BFF, Jane Foster, astrophysicist by day and tiny ball of brunette rage by night. And the big guy, of course, is Thor. Though he has a last name, he doesn't get a last name in constant punishment for him forgetting mine."

Jane huffs out a sigh. "It was one time, Darcy."

"The first time and thus the most significant." She winks at Thor, drawing from him an amused snort. "And this," she says, glancing up at Bucky, meeting his eyes as he stares down at her, the blue again bright in the early morning sun, "is James Buchanan Barnes. Otherwise known as Bucky.

"My friend."


End file.
